


Can't Get a Life (If My Heart's Not In It)

by focusfixated



Category: The Libertines
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, Early Days, First Kisses, M/M, Melodrama, My love letter to East London, Original Character(s), Pining, Slow Burn, Soulmates, UST, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-27
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-08-27 10:11:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8397577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/focusfixated/pseuds/focusfixated
Summary: When Peter came to London, Carl was waiting for him under the hanging clock in the middle of Waterloo station. It had been romantic, in the way that Peter saw all their meetings as a little romantic – a song in the making, all Terry meets Julie and a sunset over the river. In that moment, every one of his dreams hung, inchoate but irrepressible, on this one dark-haired boy with the fancy name and the rips in his jeans, who held Peter’s whole world on a shoestring. (An early days sort-of-AU story of Peter & Carl's love affair with London - and each other)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU-ish story set in the early days of Peter and Carl first meeting and living in East London together. Timelines are wonky, details are fudged, real-life events are misappropriated, liberties are taken. (The melodrama and hysterics are probably real, though.)

Peter’s sitting on the night-bus from Whitechapel to Bethnal Green, forehead pressed clammy and cold to the fogged-up glass, sticky skin cooling in the early morning air. 

It’s dark outside still, and everything’s quiet in that dead, pre-dawn way, an uncanny calm that’s usually the site of zombie-horror films and a sign of the oncoming apocalypse. 

Peter's skin itches, and his bones are brittle between the layers of exhausted muscle. He knows he must look like the worst kind of gormless cokehead, sniffing and wiping his running nose on the back of his hand, blurry and bloodshot eyes staring unblinkingly out of the finger-greasy window. 

A zombie, indeed. 

The bus pulls in on the street corner between the fishmongers and the newsagents, both shuttered and silent ahead of their opening hours, and Peter hops down at his stop. On the pavement outside his flat, a bin’s been knocked over, scattering orange peel and egg shells across the ground, and they shatter under Peter’s shoes as he walks over. 

The flat’s cold when he gets inside. It’s no surprise, considering the state of it – a dramatically dilapidated health and safety warning in the shape of a two-box-bedroom council house conversion down the seedier end of Hackney with sporadic electricity and completely inadequate heating. 

Peter used to live somewhere that had working plumbing before he came to London.

The drawback was that it didn’t have Carl. 

“You back, then?” A voice comes from behind a cracked-open door. 

Walking down the dusty hallway, Peter pauses. “Thought you were staying out,” he answers, backtracking and stepping into Carl’s room.

Carl shares the flat with Peter on a scrounger’s budget, their low rent courtesy of the dodgy front door and bathroom mould problem. It’s a shithole, frankly - but needs must, Peter knows, when you’re both skint and underemployed and only scraping a living off the back of small gigs in smaller bars and the occasional cash-in-hand stint pulling pints down the local. When he’s not freezing his bollocks off, Peter quite enjoys the romance of it all. “Did I wake you?” he asks Carl.

Carl sits up against a pillow, and the blankets fall from him, leaving him bare down to his waist. His skin’s bruised dark by the shadows, hair cutting dramatic black lines against white. There’s a girl there, too, red hair and pale skin, her hand across Carl’s legs, her lipstick on his neck. Peter wonders if Carl, ever the narcissist, knows what he looks like.

“Nah, can’t sleep,” Carl says, with a small frown. The curtain behind his head is full of moth-eaten holes that let in pinpricks from the streetlamps like constellations, a dark backdrop made like Carl himself; dirty and ragged, but close-up, scattered with light. “Got the last tube back a couple hours ago. Was a shite party, anyway. Not enough booze. And bad music.”

Peter sniffs, and wraps his arms around himself, leaning on the doorjamb. “Good company?”

“Yeah, good enough.” Carl looks down at the sleeping girl lying across him. She’s naked, and Peter can see thorny roses tattooed across her shoulders. “What about you?”

Peter had been bar-crawling across Shoreditch getting drinks off of whoever was buying, when he’d run into a girl with mad eyes, black hair, and a Louise Brooks look he’d liked. Peter had bought her a drink, then they’d taken a taxi back to her place. 

In her room, she’d taken her dress off and stood there, all bones and angles, in her cherry-red underwear, and produced a small bag of white powder from inside her bra. Laughing at the look on his face, she shook it at him and told him to pay up, peeling off her knickers and shaking them daintily off her still-heeled foot. They cut the lines out on a mirror lain flat on her vanity table, and she rubbed the last of it into his gums before she kissed him. 

“Only just got back,” Peter shrugs. He rubs his eyes and pushes his hair off his sweaty forehead. He feels like there are the cracks in his skull, hairline-thin and painful-bright. “Not sleepin' anytime soon, though.”

Carl eyes him, then pushes back the covers. “Well I’m woken up anyway, aren’t I,” he says, getting to his feet. “Go have a sit down. I’ll make some tea.”

In the kitchen, the overhead fixture buzzes like a faulty fridge, a naked bulb filling the room with oily light. It’s bright, and Peter shields his eyes as he sits himself on the only stool there; a workman’s fold-away, small and squat with creaky hinges. 

Carl putters around him, emptying and refilling the kettle, sniffing a mug and rinsing it out, swilling it awkwardly around the pile of interlocking dishes stinking up the sink. He’s barefoot and topless under the camel-coloured trenchcoat he’s thrown on against the cold, tangled hair frizzing lightly in the damp-chilled air. He frowns as he picks delicately around the squalor. 

His movements in the space around them are familiar. The way Peter watches is familiar, too.

“Here.” Carl pushes the mug at Peter once the tea’s brewed. “Jesus, your hands are cold.”

“Yeah. It’s minus – something, dunno – degrees outside,” Peter says. He blows on his tea and holds it up to his chest. “This relentless winter,” he murmurs, then sighs, miserably. “I’m sick of the cold.”

“Yeah, well, won’t be any heating for a while. Gas is all out.” Carl holds his own mug of tea up to his face. 

“God,” Peter whines. “Can’t we top it up with anything?”

“With fucking what?”

“Cash from Filthy’s last week?”

“Spent it.”

“On what?”

“On – fuck, on whatever we’ve took these past few days, I dunno—”

“Carl?” A girl comes into the doorway, yawning, blinking slow and wrinkling her nose at Carl. A rose stands out stark on her shoulder where Carl’s t-shirt slides off. “What you doing?”

Carl holds up a mug at her. “Makin’ tea.” He cocks his head at Peter. “His majesty requests it.”

“’Scuse me, you _offered_.” Peter eyes the girl. She’s pretty. The jealousy he feels in acknowledging that is a well-trodden path to him, his feet automatically finding the grooves. He flicks something nondescript and crumbling off the kitchen table at Carl. “Here, give us a fag, while you’re at it.”

“It’s six in the morning,” the girl says, looking over at Peter. “Who are you?” 

“I live here,” Peter says, and if it comes out tersely, he blames the shit still knocking about his system, giving him a headache. “Carl, come on, pass us them cigarettes.”

Carl slides a cigarette out for himself, then lobs the pack over at Peter. “I’ll be there in a minute,” he says to the girl, clicking his lighter. 

She rolls her eyes and turns back up the stairs, Carl’s t-shirt short enough to show a set of matching flower tattoos on the backs of her legs. 

“Stop staring,” Carl says, once she’s gone.

“Wasn’t,” Peter says, glumly. “What’s her name, anyway?”

Carl pulls a face, sucking on his cigarette. He puffs out a smoky breath. “Janine. Geraldine.”

“Germolene?”

“Fuck off.” Carl stubs the fag out on the countertop, where all the filth gets into the grout, and drops the butt into his half-empty mug. “You’re in a mood, tonight.”

“S’the comedown,” Peter sniffs. “Feel shite. Head’s like a broken clock. Full o’ junk pieces knocking about.” Peter demonstrates with a roll of his hand, the idea of cogs and springs falling out of his skull. “Tick, tick, boom.”

Carl gives him a look, concern or pity or whatever look it is he gets when he’s mostly sober and Peter’s mostly not, and Peter suddenly feels abruptly, terribly sad, a headfirst pitch into misery that’s sharper than any comedown. Carl heads to the doorway. “Try’n get some sleep, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Peter says, but Carl’s already gone. 

Peter goes up to his room.

Lying down on the mattress, every broken coil presses up through the meagre padding and into his back, sparking small splinters of pain across his skin. He’s sore there; Louise Brooks, with her mad eyes and cat-claw nails had scratched raw, red ridges into his back as they’d fucked the night away relentlessly, buoyed by crazed exhaustion and half a gram of coke up their noses.

It was good, but Peter doesn't like empty pleasures. He doesn't do anything without putting his heart a little into it. After he’d come, he'd stuck two fingers inside her and licked her cunt until she came again screaming and trembling and pulling his hair, but when he came up to kiss her she shook her head and rolled over, saying thanks, but could he let himself out before her boyfriend got back. She was dripping with sweat, skin the colour of sallow milk, and all the makeup had streamed away from her eyes. 

Peter drifts for a moment, too tired to sleep, too strung-out exhausted to shut down, his eyes glazed over and unseeing as he stares at the ceiling. He’s considering getting back up to find something more to drink when his ears pick up the sound of a palm hitting the paper-thin wall of Carl’s room, followed by a gasp, a _yes_ , and the entirely too pointed sounds of two people fucking; creaking bedsprings, moaning, the slap of skin on skin, an ostentatious duet of pleasure. 

Peter stills, then, reluctantly, pushes a hand into his jeans. He feels annoyed, and he feels like shit, and his sore back stings against the rough sheets, but it doesn’t seem to deter the blood pulsing into his dick. He's not trying to picture anything, but he finds himself helplessly confronted with visions anyway as the sounds from the room next door become louder, images uncontrollably taking shape around them; Carl between the redhead’s tattooed thighs, snapping his hips into her as she claws lines into his skin sharp enough to match the ones Peter's got. 

Peter's breath catches, thumb at the head of his cock. He can’t imagine the girl’s face as she moans so he pictures Louise Brooks instead, but he knows what Carl’s shirtless back looks like, sweat beading down the valley between his shoulderblades as the skin pulls and flexes over his bones, and it’s on that thought that he comes, the image snagging in his mind like a plastic bag in pondweed. 

He wipes himself off with a t-shirt that he pitches back on the floor when he’s done, then rolls over to stare at the wall. The hot flush is seeping out of his skin, making space for a creeping gloom that steals over him. What had been his main cause for euphoria a few hours ago – a buzzing room full of ecstatic faces, free drinks throughout the night, a pretty girl fucking him and letting him fuck her, a quality stash of coke hoovered up in bliss – is now collapsing like stacked-up playing cards into a feeling of utter wretchedness. 

Somehow, he knows Carl is at the crux of it, though he has no words or explanations as to why. There’s no putting his finger on it, no way to extricate the sticky cobweb-threads of his thoughts from the chemical quagmire of the comedown, so he just closes his eyes, his breathing turning wet and raspy in his throat, and tells himself it’ll all be better tomorrow.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Jesus, you two,” Gary says.
> 
> “Us two what?” Peter says, his eyes following Carl’s dark head until it disappears into the crowd. He looks at Gary. 
> 
> “Well.” Gary makes an incoherent gesture with his beer. “You know.”

It’s grimy and hot in the small, overstuffed Camden bar, and it’s coming on close to 1am. The DJ’s spinning some X-Ray Spex, and the crackling and wailing record underscores a bristling tension in the air. People are throwing themselves around on the floor, and some of the accidental jostling is starting to look purposeful; Peter’s already caught an errant fist from a beginning brawl in the side of the face, and he’s dabbing his lip to check if there’s blood when a hand grabs his shoulder.

He reacts with a start, whirling round with hands out to defend himself as best as he can from the coked-up punk spoiling for a fight, but he finds himself face-to-face instead with a friendly, grinning figure, like a buoy in a tempestuous sea. 

“Gary!” Peter shouts over the music, slinging an arm around the man’s shoulder and then jabbing him in the ribs. 

Gary intercepts the wayward hands swiftly, grabbing Peter by the wrists and gently but firmly twisting his arms out of reach. “Pete,” he says, grinning so that he’s all teeth and crinkled eyes. “It’s been a while. Where’ve you been hiding?” Gary’s voice is incongruous with the rest of him; high-pitched and softly good-humoured for a man so barrel-chested and broad-shouldered. He’s got an accent that says New Jersey, but his drinking habits and idiosyncrasies say London through and through. 

“Oh, you know,” Peter says, wrestling himself free and leaning up onto the bar. “In plain sight, as always.” Peter likes Gary. He’s a solid man, good in a crisis, and generous with a round.

“Drink?” Gary asks, with a knowing wink.

Peter grins and clasps a hand to his chest. “Ah, you know me.”

“Unfortunately,” Gary says wryly, but he turns to the bar with a fiver in his fist. “So how’re things?” he asks a moment later, sliding a bottle towards Peter. “Carl with you?”

“He’s here, somewhere.” Peter gestures back into the club. He’d left Carl at the other end of the bar, his skin flushed under the dim lights, hair sticking in black tendrils to his neck, eyes turned to flickering pinpricks darting around restlessly as he talked animatedly, chemically upbeat, to a group of willing listeners. Peter had pointedly not been one of those willing listeners, and had stalked off to drum up his own rival crowd, though he's so far only acquired this one-man band of Gary Powell and his disarming smile. “Back that-a-way. Entertaining the masses. And the lasses.” He takes a swig of his drink. “Last seen in a cosy tête-à-tête with the bionic woman.”

Gary laughs. “You what?”

“This bird Carl was talking to. She had piercings in places where piercings ought not to be.” Peter pushes his index fingers into his cheeks. “Pins right through ‘em. Metal bar in her eyebrow. Rings in her nose, and God knows where else. She’s being held together with staples. She’ll unravel if you take ‘em out.” 

“Ah well,” Gary says sagely. “Ours is not to judge.”

Peter scoffs. “He’s taken summink dodgy, Carl has. S’gone and fried his neurones.” He takes a dramatic swig of his beer. The jealousy sits naturally inside him, as ever, a firm twist of emotions like fingers too tight in his hair. He doesn’t try to unpick the tangle, the knowledge that he’s being unreasonable stopping him from doing so. Peter knows he’s got a possessive streak a mile wide, and that goes for all the things he judges to be his. Guitars. Songs. Stories. _Carl._

Peter drains his drink, and goes to put the bottle down on the bartop, but finds someone else’s in the way. 

“Sorry,” the offender says, reaching forward and moving it aside. “Bit crowded in here.”

“S’fine,” Peter says, magnanimously. “Plenty of room for all.”

The guy smiles, and then his eyes narrow a fraction. “Hey. Did you play a set here last week – uh, last weekend? You look familiar.”

“Oh,” Peter says, preening a little. “Yeah. I did. You were there, then?” 

“Yeah, I was there.” The guy now steps in a little closer, propping his elbow up on the bar. He’s skinny, a head shorter than Peter and youngish looking, with the kind of angelic openness to his face natural blonds seem to have. He’s wearing black jeans with artful rips in them, and his tatty, sleeveless Sid Vicious t-shirt doesn’t suit his soft features at all. “You were great. I had your songs in my head all night, after.”

Their set at the bar the previous weekend had been a short one. Without a fully-formed band, it’s just Peter and Carl, their guitars and their songs, half-recorded on demo tapes with peeling labels indecipherable to anyone except themselves. They play open-mic nights in sticky-floored pubs and three-song acoustic sets in basement flats, short gigs in rowdy bars as far across London as their empty pockets will take them – and when the audience fails, there’s always the pigeons nesting in the bandstand on the edge of Victoria Park. 

For Peter, most of the time, it’s enough for him to look over his shoulder and see Carl outlined in light and smoke, hair in his eyes and fingers on strings. He asks for nothing more than to be able to play music with his best friend. Carl’s the one who wants them to be _famous_ – or at least, clings doggedly to the belief that fame is the fix to cure whatever ill plagues him; seeking validation, Peter thinks, in all the wrong places. 

The boy’s eyes now are fixed on Peter. His hands fiddle compulsively with the label on his beer bottle. Peter looks back at him, slightly enjoying his discomfort, though not unkindly. “Who’s the other guy who was onstage with you?” the guy asks, finally. 

“Carl? He’s my—”

“Alright, lads.” Carl appears at Peter’s elbow, stumbling a little. “Whoops, sorry mate,” he says to Gary as he knocks into him. He steadies himself with a hand on Peter’s waist. “He-e-ey, Pete, Peter,” he says, grinning wide, pressing his face into Peter’s neck. Peter feels his skin prickle under the thick smothering of alcohol, a pins-and-needles unfurling down his spine that’s like iron filings creeping over him towards the magnetic points of Carl’s mouth on his neck and his hands on Peter’s waist. “Hey, you want to get out? Bar’s packed with wankers.”

“Cheers, mate,” Gary says, toasting Carl with his beer. 

“Not you, man,” Carl says, punching Gary on the shoulder. He gestures over at the end of the bar. “Them, over there. Gang of Jack Wills-type cunts – don’t fuckin’ know who let them in, Jesus.”

“Tell me about it,” the guy next to Peter pipes up. “They must’ve took a wrong turn somewhere.”

Carl looks over in surprise. “And who the fuck’re you?” he asks.

“Well, uh, I’m – leaving too, if you are.” The boy glances at Peter, biting his lip. His gaze flickers up and then down, a loaded look that Peter knows how to read, though he doesn’t often act on it. The boy seems to steel himself, then says, boldly, “Though I was hoping I could buy you a drink, first.” 

Peter grins, delighted and endeared by the kid's nervous determination. Carl's expression narrows, suspicion and distaste pinching his mouth.

“Yeah, well, we _are_ leaving,” he says. He turns to Peter. “You coming?” 

“I think I’ll stick around.” Peter cocks his head. “What about your Frankenstein?”

“Who?” Carl frowns.

“That bird with all the piercings you were talking to.”

“Oh.” Carl gestures vaguely. “Gone to the loos, I think.” He frowns again. “Don’t call her that.”

“What?”

“Frankenstein.”

Peter grins, and he feels it stretch his lips, mocking. “Sorry, s’it got a name, then?”

Carl stares blankly at Peter for a second, then scowls. “Can’t remember.”

Peter’s grin grows wider, and he toasts Carl with his beer bottle. “Frankenstein it is, then.”

“Fuck off, she’s actually nice.”

“Is she.”

“She’s fit.”

Peter makes a face. “Hard to tell under all that shrapnel.” 

The guy next to Peter laughs, short and nervous, though it dies almost immediately as Carl steps forward with a belligerent, “Right, who the fuck—”

“’Ey, lads,” Gary intervenes with his light voice. “Probably just drop it, eh?”

Carl looks at Peter. Peter looks back at him, deliberately innocent-looking, which he knows grates on Carl’s nerves when he’s spoiling for a fight. Gary puts a warning hand on Carl’s arm, but Carl shakes him off with a frustrated noise of disgust, then turns on his heel and stalks away. 

“Jesus, you two,” Gary says.

“Us two what?” Peter says, his eyes following Carl’s dark head until it disappears into the crowd. He looks at Gary. 

“Well.” Gary makes an incoherent gesture with his beer. “You know.”

Peter doesn’t think he does know – or at least he’s not particularly interested in hearing Gary’s opinion on it, so he doesn’t ask him to clarify. He fills his mouth instead with a slog of beer and feels it go thickly down his throat. He swallows, feeling queasy. 

“So...” The kid shuffles his empty beer bottle back and forth between his hands and jerks his head towards Carl’s exit. “Are you two. Um.”

Peter thinks about being deliberately obtuse, but he knows what he’s being asked. “No,” he says, the simplest answer. There’s an image in his mind, of Carl with lipstick-bruises on his neck and red-raw nail-lines on his back, and the echo of a feeling he carries around with him in his chest, softer or stronger in frequency depending on the day. On how many pills he’s taken. On how free Carl is with his touches. On how willing Peter is to listen to his own thoughts. 

He bats it all away, suddenly, restless, sick of the crowd and unsettled by the resentment that hangs in the air like cigarette smoke in a trail that leads back to Carl. “You want to get out of here?” he asks, bluntly.

“Sure,” the guy says, and he steps hastily forward. Under the barlights his eyes are wide and guileless, a soft, dewy brown, looking hopefully up at Peter. 

Peter hooks a finger in the neck of the kid’s t-shirt. “Your place or mine?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter reaches a hand out and pushes Carl’s hair back from where it falls darkly on his forehead and cheeks. The skin feels damp and chilled by sleep-sweat gone cold in the morning air, but hot underneath, like there’s a fever-bright light burning in his skull. 
> 
> “What're you doing,” Carl says, and his voice is flat.

“Babe,” the girl slurs, snaking an arm round Peter’s neck, the other going for his pocket. “You got anything left?” Her legs are shaky in her heels, supermodel-skinny and coyly turned-in as she drapes herself on Peter, fingers fluttering over his chest and hips. 

Dawn is round the corner, but the lights are still on in the dark of Shoreditch. They’ve been out all night, watching some band play so badly out of tune it might have been on purpose, dancing to fucking awful music with even worse people.

They’d left the bar with a trail of empty-headed trendies, half-friends and new acquaintances, drinking long after the doors closed up, gradually losing everyone along the way - all except one girl who followed them with a kind of vapid determination all the way down to the canal, where they sat by the water for a while, black and shimmering and dirty as tar in the dark. Peter had looked over at the girl, blonde hair a bright, opalescent halo round her head, and Carl next to her, the black shape of his shoulders cutting through the alien, apocalyptic orange of the lamplight as he trailed blue smoke into the night sky. Side by side, they made an otherworldly sort of pairing.

Peter wanted to take her home. 

They’re drunk and high, all three of them, hanging like crooks at a bus shelter with their sweat-filthy hair and makeup stains. The night’s got a chilly bite to it, and the girl is wearing Peter’s jacket, but Peter’s got warm whiskey kicking about his guts, pink pills splintering his neurones, and he feels fine, fine, fine. 

“Nah, we took it all,” he answers. Peter takes the girl’s hand and links their fingers together. He doesn’t remember her name. 

“Give us a fag, then?” She walks the fingers of her free hand up Peter’s neck and touches his mouth. 

“All out. You’ll have to ask Carl.”

Carl starts, blinking over at them in faint confusion. His hair is damp on his forehead and his eyes are ice-bright, pupils shrunk pinprick-small. “What?”

Peter touches Carl’s arm. “Got any fags?” 

“Oh. Y-yeah. Here.” Carl fumbles in his pocket. There are grey shadows on his skin, and smudges the shape of thumbprints on his neck. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and hands it to the girl. 

“Thanks.” The girl tip-toes up to give Carl a kiss on the cheek, but he turns his head in surprise as she leans in and bumps their noses together, so the kiss lands on his lips. “Oops,” the girl says, grinning. 

Carl looks at her, confusion etched in his expression for a moment, smoothing over as she leans in to kiss him again, her fingers threading up into his hair, her skinny frame swamped by Peter’s jacket. 

Peter watches them, the sight of them kissing shuttering like strobes in his brain every time he blinks. He suddenly feels curiously blank, devoid of feeling, filled only with a chemical slosh of lights and colours. He’s trying to think, but he can’t remember the girl’s name. “Where’s the bus?” he says, after a moment. “Thought you said the bus was here in a minute.”

Carl pulls away from the girl with a guilty jerk. “Yeah alright,” he says. “It’s just there.” He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. Peter stares, Carl’s fingers by his lips, and then out into the dark as he points down the road at the approaching bus, a trundling red beacon in the night. 

Inside the bus, the top deck is empty, so they take the back row, feet up on the seats like teenage scoundrels. The girl’s hand is lying palm-down on Peter’s thigh, but her other one goes inside Carl’s jacket, around his waist, and she leans her head on his shoulder, closing her eyes. Carl puts an arm around her shoulder. He sweeps her hair gently away from her face.

Peter’s head hits the back seat as he stares up at the speckled grey ceiling, watching the air vents warp and bend in time with the rolling motion of the wheels on the bus. The good feelings from earlier in the night that came on like liquid warmth and gold patches of light are ebbing, diffusing grey into the air, mingling with the sweaty, sour smell of London’s drunkards. He twists sideways, away from the tangled pair on the seat next to him, frowning against the dark curls of something bitter sneaking into him. 

“Oi, sleeping beauty.” Carl’s voice snaps Peter back to himself, and he blinks as he looks over to see Carl standing up, shaking the girl’s shoulder. “S’our stop next, we need get off the bus.”

The girl groans, slumping childish and uncooperative in her seat. “I’m _tired_ ,” she mumbles, as Carl helps her get up. “Fuck, what bus’re we on? I can’t remember how to get hooome.” She staggers to her feet, frowning, then her face lights up, looking over at Peter. “Baaabe, can I crash at yours?”

“That was the idea,” Peter murmurs. He looks at Carl, but Carl’s attention is focused on getting the girl’s arm around his shoulder, and her slumped, skinny figure off the bus. Peter steps out onto the pavement alone behind them. 

Back at the flat, the girl’s cheerful drunkenness has quieted into grey-faced exhaustion, and her tottering about in her break-neck heels is no longer playful and coy, but laboured and clumsy as she tries to make her way up the stairs, pausing occasionally to draw shuddering breaths, eyes closed. 

“Fuckin’ hell,” Carl mutters, as she hoists herself with a shivering effort to the top of the landing.

They stick her in Peter’s bed, prop her up on her side, head raised on a pillow, in case the sour cocktail of pills and booze churning on her empty stomach comes back up in the night. Peter thoughtfully leaves a metal pedal bin with a broken lid on the bed next to her. It’s not exactly the companion for the night he’d envisaged for her. 

He goes to Carl’s room. “Let me in, then,” he says, and shoves his way onto Carl’s mattress, kicking at his legs and shoving him over like an uncooperative pillow. 

“What’s wrong with the sofa,” Carl mutters, stubbornly immovable as Peter tries to insinuate himself under the covers. 

“S’fuckin’ freezing, s’what’s wrong,” Peter says, wrenching the covers out of Carl’s bulldog grip. “C’mon, don’t be a cunt.”

Carl glares at Peter from under a curtain of dark hair. “Oh well since you’re askin’ so _nicely_.”

“Please,” Peter says, and without waiting for acquiescence, wriggles down under the covers with a shudder at the feel of cold sheets. 

Carl grunts in vague protest, but doesn’t say anything as Peter settles in beside him. The exhaustion hits them both almost at the same time, and they fall uneasily into a silent, sickly sleep.

*****

The following morning breaks in cold patches of greyish light. Peter’s head is heavy, a hollow boulder sunk into the pillows as he wakes, and it takes him a minute to get his bearings as his eyes crack open, sticky and crusted and squinted against the brightness coming through the useless curtains.

He’s aware, as he edges into consciousness, of the rucked-up, sweat-damp jeans not shed the night before twisted around his legs, hot and uncomfortable – and then, as he wakes a little more fully, of the wholly contrasting temperature of the air in the room around him, cold and sharp. 

Peter sits up slowly, letting his head re-orientate itself in increments, tongue thick and cottony in his mouth. He needs a drink of water. He badly needs a piss. Hesitantly, he untangles his ankles from the sheets, sweeps his legs out from under the blanket and onto the floor. The shock of the icy floorboards makes him recoil in disgust, a violent shudder travelling its way up his body, rattling his sore head.

“Fuck,” he whispers. Slowly, painfully, he gathers one of the blankets, an old tartan thing, heavy and scratchy and more rug than blanket, around his shoulders, and hefts himself to his feet, his skin shrinking away from the cold touch every time he takes a step. 

He makes it to the bathroom. The tiny window stuffed in the damp plastering is whistling pitifully, gusts of cold air rattling the broken glass. Ice has formed around the edges, on the inside, and Peter can see his breath puff out in feeble white mists. 

He pisses, and tries to flush, but the handle pulls at nothing, making a hollow clunking noise. Peter goes back out into the corridor, and makes painful, hesitant progress back to Carl’s room. From the doorway, Peter sees Carl’s eye crack open, bloodshot and bleary beneath dark tendrils of hair. 

“Feel so fuckin’ rough,” Carl mumbles. “Can’t go back to sleep. My head’s a fuckin’ nightmare.”

Peter pads back towards the bed, lying gingerly back down on the mattress under the enormous rug. Peter’s own head feels thick and gelatinous, brain pushing up against the back of his eyes and into the cracks in his skull. The air around him is dirtyingly cold, and he can feel it seeping into his pores, like snowflakes settling onto a corpse. “S’those pills. They were dodgy.”

“S’your mates that are dodgy.”

Peter shrugs a shoulder. He likes to give people the benefit of the doubt, even when his head’s splitting open. “They’re not all bad.”

“Tell me that again when I don’t feel like I’m dying.”

Peter shivers, the motion making him feel like his head’s going to fall apart, splinter like an old, battered oak into pieces of woodchip. He feels a bit sick, nauseous, like he’s got a fever or something on account of the damp, cold air pressing in on his lungs. They take enough of a battering already, his lungs, soaking up smoke and nicotine like dirty grey sponges. He doesn’t want to get pneumonia on top of everything. “I don’t want to get pneumonia,” he says.

“You won’t get fucking pneumonia.”

“I might. I don’t feel well.” 

“That’s ‘cos you took enough to put down a small horse last night and now you’ve got a fucking hangover.” 

Peter sits up a little on his pillow. Carl’s skin is grey-looking in the sickly morning light, veins standing out in purple threads over his eyelids. He’s sapped of his usual energy, small and sunken and swamped by the blankets.

Peter reaches a hand out and pushes Carl’s hair back from where it falls darkly on his forehead and cheeks. The skin feels damp and chilled by sleep-sweat gone cold in the morning air, but hot underneath, like there’s a fever-bright light burning in his skull. 

“What you doing,” Carl says, and his voice is flat.

“Not doing anything,” Peter murmurs. His eyes are sore from a lack of sleep, disorientated by the sunrise creeping in through the window while he’s awake, still drunk, still high. Everything shimmers like a dream. He places his palm over Carl’s eyes. He can feel them moving against his hand, under thin skin, eyelashes fluttering in a quiet tremor.

Peter’s lips and tongue are dry in his mouth. He wants – something, but can’t put it into words, or make sense of why it’s so difficult to do so, the gap between thinking and speaking a gulf widening with every second he teeters on the verge of it. 

Carl’s mouth is open. Peter leans in and kisses him.

Their lips touch for a brief moment, cracked and sourly dry, and Peter feels the tiny jerk of Carl’s surprise, the hitch in his breath, the way his body binds up rigidly in one sudden motion. Peter pulls away. 

There’s silence. Carl doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t move a muscle, and the only sound is his thick breathing, and the dry click of Peter’s throat as he swallows. 

Peter’s head is echoing with deafening silence – a shrilly blank void in his mind where sense and consideration should be. He’s not thinking, not feeling anything except a trembling inevitability, a strange déjà-vu flash like all of this is something that might have already happened before. 

He leans back in again, lips licked wet, tacky and soft. His mouth is open against Carl’s, and he feels the tremor of Carl’s breath inside him. And then, a kick in the guts, when he feels Carl’s tongue, light and hesitant, touch his. 

It lasts a second, and then it’s gone in an instant as Carl suddenly jerks away, as if only just realising what he’d decided to do. Peter’s hand slips from Carl’s eyes. They flicker open to look at him, bloodshot and unreadable. 

“H-hey.”

Peter blinks at the sound of a voice, then rolls slowly over to see the girl they took home with them, standing in the open doorway of Carl’s room. 

“Alright?” the girl says, and her eyes are a little wide. “The – your door was open. Sorry. I – heard you talking, so I, um.” She laughs a little self-consciously. “Anyway, wow, what a night, Jesus, I feel like my head’s been run over.” She’s wearing Peter’s jacket again, hugging it closed around her against the cold. Her dress is crumpled from the night she spent in it, though she’s removed her heels and fishnets. She looks suddenly younger, bare white feet turned in like a little bird. “So, um. I was just – actually going to ask – d’you mind if I use your kitchen? Could do with a tea. If you’ve got tea.”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Peter says. 

The girl pauses, and there’s a slight pinkness to her cheeks as she says, “Do you – you guys want one?”

“Yeah, cheers.” Peter turns to Carl. “Carl?”

“Cheers,” Carl says, voice thin. 

“Okay.” The girl ducks quickly out of the doorway, and Peter hears the light patter of her footsteps down the stairs.

Carl rolls over to lie on his back, silent, his breathing thick and shallow like he’s got a cold. After a moment, suspended and terrible, Peter mumbles, “Got to piss,” and rolls out of bed, stumbling away.

In the bathroom, Peter holds himself up on the edge of the sink. It’s cracked and leaking rust from the taps, an orange-brown discharge cutting through the ugly floral porcelain. Peter stares at himself in the mirror. He touches his face, and the skin feels spongy and numb. He puts a hand to his crotch, and finds he’s half-hard under the clumsy buttons of his jeans. He turns the tap on, lets it run for a moment, then sticks his face under it, feeling the cold like a punch in the guts.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carl drags Peter out through the bar, out of the foyer and through the doors. Once outside, he lets go of Peter’s arm with a forceful shove, sending Peter stumbling into the wall. Peter gasps in a breath, winded, but manages to say, “I had this idea for a song—” 
> 
> “And it couldn’t _wait?_ ” Carl bursts out.

Carl, Peter discovered early on, was special to him in a way no one had ever been before. 

Carl had a poet’s soul, clear as anything in his overlong hair and guitar-calloused hands, a dirty-punk hippie’s son who scrapped with bigger lads than him and smoked cigarettes like he breathed the air. He was an artist, carefully talented, blazing with potential and filled with a terrible sort of romance about life, Shakespearean pacts of love and violence commonplace in his world. 

Carl was also vain; self-conscious and strikingly aware of what he wanted to see in the mirror. The problem was that no matter the angle, the glum uncertainty he nurtured like a wounded creature meant that whatever he saw there, he'd never believe it anyway. 

Peter could see it. Peter always believed in it. And sometimes, in moments of reasonable clarity, Peter admitted to himself that he guarded his knowledge of it with a determination that was ugly with jealousy. 

It's a Friday evening, and Carl’s preparing himself to go to work, a new job he picked up in the last month as a kind of fancy waiter for theatre-types throwing elegant parties down at the Old Vic theatre in Waterloo. He’s tying up the laces on his boots, wrapping the scarf his ex-girlfriend bought him around his neck, looking unnaturally respectable. 

Peter, in contrast, is on his back, on the couch, deeply settled between the old cushions and the guitar across his chest, empty cans of cheap beer at his feet. 

They haven’t spoken about their kiss from the night before, but something about it lingers around them. Carl is snappish, irritable in small surges, as if something he can’t shake keeps rearing up in his memory to bother him. It feels, bizarrely, like a secret they're both keeping from each other. 

“Did you not want to work on them new songs, then?” Peter asks, not looking away from his fingers picking out a melody on the fretboard. 

“Did you not want to eat for the next few weeks, then?” Carl retorts. 

Peter pulls a face. He’s drunk, which is a usual state of affairs of an evening, but he’s not usually getting drunk on his own, and it’s making him sullen. “Not hungry.”

“Man cannot live on liquids alone.” Carl shrugs on his leather jacket, the black worn to brown at the elbows. “And funnily enough booze and fags don’t come for free, either.”

Peter’s guitar plinks, jarring and discordant. “Rent’s not due for another two weeks,” he mutters.

“So we’re just going to busk for tips on Southbank in the meantime, are we?”

“Yeah,” Peter says, seriously, unable to comprehend how Carl – who can be so romantic in his notions about art and music – can be so frequently blindsided by such ordinary, pedestrian practicalities as paying the rent. He puts down his guitar, and looks up at Carl. “ _Yes_.”

Carl looks at him, eyebrows a knot of irritation. “Don’t be stupid, Peter.”

Carl’s prim attempts at responsibility, Peter thinks, are almost laughable. Carl seems to think that getting a proper, decent job will somehow help with the band. Peter thinks they won't be able to concentrate on the band at _all_ if Carl has to skip out on rehearsals to worry about a job – especially a job like _this_ , serving champagne and canapés in a theatre to buxom women and fruity old men who smell of talcum powder, and whose foreheads shine damply with comfortable wealth under the interval lights. 

Peter hates the idea of it, with a furious and righteous passion. 

“Don’t go,” Peter says, and he tries not to sound pathetic, or pleading. He knows there’s nothing more likely to kick Carl’s defences into overdrive than being made to feel guilty. Peter continues, reasonably, “It’s bullshit, and you know it.”

“It’s not that bad,” Carl mumbles. He zips up his jacket. “I’m gonna be late.”

“Don’t do it,” Peter calls, but the door shuts on his words. 

Peter flops back with a frustrated sigh against the pillows, trying to fight the way his drink-sodden mind is distorting his emotions. In the dark, debilitating parts of his mind, the simple fact – Carl, leaving him – is becoming a twisted, distressing thought – Carl, _leaving him_ \- and is blooming rapidly into the fear - his only real fear, if he’s honest – that no matter what he says, Carl will always find it easy to walk away from him, in the end.

Peter lasts about an hour, angrily writing a mess of lyrics reeking of bitterness and self-loathing, until he finds he can't stand it anymore. He quietly puts his guitar to the floor, then grabs his jacket, and leaves the flat. 

The night is cold and uncovered, crystalline-sharp against his skin. The stars are faded from view despite the vividly black, clear skies, obscured by the smoggy haze of lamplights and shopfronts. Peter’s breath unfurls in foggy white puffs, diffusing damply into the scarf he’s got pulled around his neck and nose, his only real shield against the cold.

It’s a long bus-ride to Waterloo, and he spends it trying not to think of very much, staring at car headlamps and the sparkling strings of light across the river, the stops and shops and bars and pubs flickbooking past him in rapid succession. 

He arrives at the Old Vic theatre, and the lights are all on, twinkling around faux-vintage variety posters like Victorian music-hall bills. It must be the interval – couples in warm coats and smart shoes pepper the steps outside for a breath of fresh air or a cigarette, and the ushers manning the open doors gaze patiently outwards, shivering in their starched shirts. 

Peter manages to sidle in behind a group of foreign tourists chattering animatedly over their programmes, and makes his way calmly to the bar, dosed up on liquid courage and letting the suspicious frowns of the barstaff clocking his ripped jeans and scruffy hair slide off him as he peers around the room. 

He finds Carl, in a shirt and bowtie, looking like some kind of fifties filmstar, all gelled-back hair and smart-pressed trousers, a plate of vol-au-vents in his hand, walking over to a beckoning punter in a dinner jacket. Carl offers the plate forward, a grim sort of plastic smile on his face, and Peter suddenly feels such a rise of anger in his throat that he charges over, grabs Carl by the sleeve and yanks him away. 

“Peter!” Carl stumbles, and a few vol-au-vents fall to the wayside. “What are you doing?” he hisses, jerking his arm away. 

“What are _you_ doing?” Peter says, not bothering to keep his voice down. “Have you _seen_ yourself?” He shoves at Carl’s shoulder, then gestures desperately around him at all the faces starting to turn towards them in snub-nosed distaste. He feels furious with self-righteousness on Carl’s behalf. He doesn’t belong here. He doesn’t belong here at all. “Have you seen _them_?”

Carl’s face is livid. “Peter—” 

“Look at them, Carl!” Peter insists. He feels emotion welling up in him, a boozy pitifulness that makes him claw at Carl’s arms in pathetic desperation. “You're bailing on us for _this_? We were supposed to be rehearsing—”

“Jesus, Peter—”

“You’re better than this, Carl—” Peter stumbles, his legs and voice wobbly, words falling from him in slurred distress. “I’ve - I've come to save your soul!”

“Peter!”

“They’re cunts, Carl, they’re all - they - you should be with—”

“Fucking Jesus _Christ_ ,” Carl says, angrily, and he grabs Peter by the arm. The gaily self-satisfied chatter in the room has petered out to nothing, and there’s a pair of security guards winding their way calmly in their direction. “Fucking – move it!”

Carl drags Peter out through the bar, out of the foyer and through the doors. Once outside, he lets go of Peter’s arm with a forceful shove, sending Peter stumbling into the wall. Peter gasps in a breath, winded, but manages to say, “I had this idea for a song—” 

“And it couldn’t fucking _wait?_ ” Carl bursts out. 

“No,” Peter says, emphatic.

“Fuck, Peter,” Carl says, thudding a fist against his leg in contained anger. “They’re going to fucking fire me.”

“Good, then you can—” Peter starts to say, but his words are cut off as Carl lets out a noise of rage, stamping his foot like an angry child. 

“Fuck you, Peter, you’re _always_ pulling shit like this.” Carl shoves the heels of his hands against his eyes, his whole body a line of coiled distress. 

Peter doesn’t ask _like what_. Instead, he mumbles, “We were meant to be practising.” 

“You can’t just—” Carl makes a wild gesture, fists closing and opening as if he can’t decide what to do with them. “Just – fucking, wait here.” And with that, he turns on his heel and stamps back inside. 

Peter slumps against the wall, trembling a little on his whiskey-weak legs, feeling suddenly quelled in the aftermath of Carl’s fury. He shivers. It’s fucking freezing outside, and there’s an uncomfortable, icy lump in the pit of his stomach leeching coldly outwards. 

He swallows it down. He just wants – _needs_ \- Carl to be with him, for whatever that means. He doesn’t mind fighting; the flare of Carl’s temper and Peter’s helpless melodrama make it hard for them to avoid it. But it makes him sick to imagine Carl not wanting what Peter wants. Not believing the same things that Peter believes. Not looking out into the dark and seeing the same landscape there. 

He sees Carl come back out a moment later, face blackly inscrutable. He doesn’t say a word, simply stalks past Peter as if he doesn’t care whether Peter follows or not, jacket zipped up to the chin and face half-buried in his scarf.

They take the bus back together, though Carl doesn’t speak to him at all. The deck is empty enough that they can spread out, Carl taking a window seat near the back, Peter sitting nearest the walkway on a different set of seats in front of Carl, looking backwards over his shoulder with a sad, entreating look. 

But Carl just keeps his head turned away and Peter, eventually, gives up, leaning forward and pressing his hot forehead to the cold, metal pole.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Alright, Carl,” Peter croaks. He expects Carl to grunt in response, sniping and griping like he does whenever he’s got a hangover. 
> 
> What he doesn’t expect is for Carl to storm furiously into his bedroom, drag him naked from his bed and sock him squarely in the jaw.

“I was thinking,” Peter says, “we should go see Dave.”

Carl’s slumped in his seat, peering at Peter through the bottom of an empty pint glass.

Earlier that day, they'd got their hands on a couple of twenties, fortuitously filched off some suited-and-booted wanker from the banking district who was too ensconced in the pink pages of the Financial Times to notice them flutter from his pocket. They used it to buy themselves lunch in the pub, proper sandwiches and a plate of chips, and had been steadily drinking the rest of the profits all afternoon.

Carl’s fingers are now tracing circles in the wet condensation on the tabletop. His eyes flick up, a dim spark of interest in them, but his expression quickly resettles into something bland and blank that's giving Peter nothing; no insight, no visual clues to pull from.

Peter drums his hands restlessly on the tabletop. "What d'you reckon, then?" he presses. He stretches his face into a grin, and feels it crack on his face, like the muscles haven’t been used right in a while. “Do we pay the ol’ beggar a visit?”

Dave's a crooked-boned retiree with worse teeth than Peter's got, a flat full of less-than-legitimate 70s sports collectors' memorabilia, and a generous stock of multifarious chemicals of varying degrees of legality. Peter's running low on recreationals, and is feeling an especially strong itch to substitute his normal feelings for chemical ones, egged on by the victorious clinking of unearned change in his pockets, and the need building under his skin like gritty layers of sand.

Carl only shrugs. He’s deflated of his usual belligerence, quiet when he'd usually be scoffing some opinion, uncommunicative in the face of Peter's needling.

He still hasn’t told Peter if he was fired from his job, or if he just walked out following their fight that night at the Old Vic. He seems to think it makes no difference.

Peter tells himself it doesn't - the outcome is still the same, Carl being freed from the constraints of that awful job - but getting what he wanted feels hollow up against Carl’s cold shoulders.

They're on the underground to Whitechapel an hour later, the rattling carriage transporting only a handful of quiet travellers on this early Wednesday afternoon. Peter tries to parse the mood by watching the pensive glances Carl throws his own yellowed reflection in the tunnel-black windows, but knowing Carl - meanly, Peter thinks - he might just be checking out his hair.

They arrive at Dave’s, a shoddy-looking affair from the outside, grimly-streaked green paint on the front door, scored by cracks that look like claw-marks. Dave greets them after one short press of the buzzer with a warm grin that shows a scattered mouthful of teeth and invites them into a plush and ornate junkyard of lovingly-collected garbage.

Peter has a peek around the crooked corners of the flat as Dave heads off into a back room, excitement and an unidentifiable anxiousness expanding sponge-like through his body. Carl’s by his side, still quiet in his dark, stubborn way, running a hand over the greasy finger-printed glass of a wide fish tank, bubbling with sparklingly-clean water and almost certainly illegally-acquired tropical fish.

“Alright, ye beauties,” he murmurs, dipping a finger into the water, sending the fish into a flurry of iridescence. He glances up, quick and guilty, but Dave is still rummaging next door, so he catches Peter’s eye instead. Peter smiles at him, and for a quick moment, just before he schools his features back to blank, Carl smiles back. _Good_ , Peter thinks, fiercely, and he grips hard onto the feeling.

Dave returns a moment later, kindly and gentle like a well-meaning uncle with his toothless, encouraging smile, carrying what they came for; a small bag of ABC’s, the greatest hits of narcotics in a clear plastic pocket, courtesy of their very last pennies.

“We should get some people ‘round,” Carl mumbles, later, when they’re back in their kitchen, unloading the goods. Peter’s thumbing through the pills, the packet of white powder, the small bundles of weed as he spreads them out on the table. There’s a prickling in his fingers. He shoves his hands in his pockets.

“Alright,” he says, agreeably. His hand closes around a couple of 10ps. “I’ll make some calls.”

“I’m inviting Charlene,” Carl declares, and even though Peter says nothing to that, Carl’s eyes still narrow as he says, “Peter, I’m inviting my own fucking girlfriend.”

Peter closes his mouth over any noise of protest he might have made. He doesn’t like Charlene for no real reason he can extrapolate from his head. It’s beyond his usual jealousy, his general antipathy towards Carl’s girlfriends. There’s just something particular about this one that grates on him, like all the grain on her skin just runs the opposite way to his. She’s a prickly, unlikeable thing, and he doesn’t think she likes him much, either.

He doesn’t say anything, though, and goes outside to use the phonebox at the bottom of the road.

That evening, their previously empty flat gets gradually fuller, the air getting thick with noise and the smell of multitudes of aftershaves, perfumes and cigarettes. There’s shrieks and chatter and a clattering of heels as people go up and down the stairs. There’s music as someone picks up a guitar – their own, hopefully, if they don’t want to confront an enraged Carl, so precious about his instruments – leading a gathered crowd in a trashed rendition of a Bob Dylan song, not quite covering the screeching howl of feedback coming from the Velvet Underground record winding its noisy way out of Carl’s open bedroom door.

Peter’s taken his dosage tonight already, and the warm flush of the high’s broken out in a sweat on his skin. He’s lying on his back on the floor, fingers combing restlessly through the short, wiry hair of a girl lying across his chest, who’s singing along to a mystery song all by herself. She’s pretty, boyishly skinny, and she’s arching contentedly under Peter’s hands.

Carl’s over on the other side of the room, sunk into the old sofa. His girlfriend’s there, legs draped over him, and they’re kissing with enthusiastically open mouths and conspicuous tongues, drawing looks and comments their way. It’s horribly affected, Peter thinks loftily, and he finds himself increasingly irritated by the way Carl’s half-lidded eyes cast unsubtle glances around him, seeking, like he always does, attention and validation in the most desperately hollow of ways.

Peter gets to his feet, forgetting about the girl leaning on him, who bangs her head against the floor with an angry, “Ow, you _bell-end_.” He goes to the kitchen and pours himself a glass of water. The drugs are good, for their part, pulsing warmly through his body, but his head’s not getting with the programme; there’s a wedge of something overwrought and bitter lodged in the deepest part of his brain, not getting smoothed over by the high, like a stone stuck in his shoe.

“Alright, Peter?” Carl’s suddenly there, stumbling to Peter’s side. Peter holds up his glass of water, and Carl takes it, drinking deeply from it. He hands it back to Peter. “Cheers,” he says, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. His lips are red and a little puffy.

“How you feeling?” Peter asks, pouring himself another glass.

“Alright.” Carl looks jittery, keyed-up, and his hair’s a tangled mess. “Could do with, uh,” he breaks off with a huff of laughter. “Dunno, wanna do a line?”

Peter scries the bits of his brain not clogged-up with chemicals. He decides too many of them are still too sober. “Sure,” he says, shrugging.

They go into the bathroom, kicking out a couple of girls making out in the bath, giggling and smudged with floury traces of soap and limescale, their threadbare t-shirts damp with shower-water. Carl waggles his eyebrows and makes a lewd comment, but they just roll their eyes as they leave, closing the door behind them.

Without too much ceremony, Peter diligently cuts the lines out on the back of the cistern, and they snort them up, one at a time with a pink straw pilfered out the kitchen cupboard. There’s a pause of indeterminate, elasticated time, in which the music thudding outside the closed door seems to amplify, thundering in his ears, and then Peter feels it, the cold-bright kick in the back of his throat, and a wonderful clarity that turns everything sparkling.

Carl stands in front of him, pupils blown wide, skin shining with a sheen of sweat, distorted somehow under the yellow strip-lighting into something alien and unreal. Peter reaches forward to touch Carl’s face in chemically-induced wonderment as he starts to lose the feeling in his fingers. When Carl laughs and touches him back, Peter feels his heart beat in a violent convulsion that rattles his teeth.

They head back downstairs and Peter, suddenly feeling infinitely more alive, finds himself talking to anyone and everyone, pulsing with a warm euphoria, feeling their chattering words fluttering through his mind, overwriting whatever dark thing was lingering there before with smooth white light.

And there’s another feeling, too, curling around and under the high; a restless tug deep in his gut, every time a hand touches his skin, or a body brushes past his, a slow-burning desire to kiss and touch, an urge to fuck, adrenaline prickling his veins, centring at his core. He feels like a planet out of orbit, his body seeking to gravitate towards whatever’s pulling at him with magnetic insistence, but his grasp on exactly who or what that should be is rapidly slipping from him as the drugs bloom out into his blood.

He wonders where Carl is, and his heart beats fast, like a trapped animal in the cage of his ribs.

And then somebody whispers in his ear, touches his back, and a dark, blossoming tangle of want wraps around his spine. He follows the feeling in the wet mess of his thoughts like a trail of breadcrumbs and finds himself standing in his own bedroom.

There’s a turbulence in him, and the chemical cocktail kicking around his synapses seems to billow like foam out of the top of a shaken-up bottle of coke, suddenly overflowing and whiting-out his vision. He loses all sense of where he is and what he’s doing, his mind a quiet, dumb spectator pulled along by the automatic motions of his body.

He registers only a mystery hand on his chest, fluttering like a moth over his skin as it pushes his shirt aside, and the smell of sweet wine and coconut cream, before his mind stops registering anything, and his body takes over.

*

Morning, when it arrives, breaks with a relentlessly cheery brightness, shards of light coming through the dirty windows behind the curtains they forgot to shut the night before.

Peter blinks blearily awake. His head feels like it’s filled with shattered glass, and he sits up with painful slowness to try to tug at the edge of a curtain and blot out the sun. His hands are shaking, and he suddenly has a memory of being fifteen, getting pissed-up on half a litre of supermarket-brand vodka down by the underpass, waking up shuddering violently in a trolley in a carpark four miles away, confused and clutching his excruciatingly fragile skull.

Similar situations, in a way – he doesn’t know how he ended up there, long legs awkwardly draped over the metal caging of the trolley, head cricked painfully against the child seat. He doesn’t know how he ended up here, either, long legs entwined with someone else’s, her body curled into his. With a groan, he comes a little back into himself, brain sloshing and settling into place as he gets his bearings.

Then he looks up, and sees Carl in the doorway, his face white. Peter sympathises for a moment. He can’t remember exactly what they took – the evidence like a crime scene scattered around the flat probably showing by process of elimination exactly how much was ingested. He feels like there’s timpani drums in his ears and liquid lava in his stomach, and he imagines, if the fragile fragments of his memory are correct, that Carl must be feeling the same.

“Alright, Carl,” he croaks. He expects Carl to grunt in response, sniping and griping like he does whenever he’s got a hangover, carrying on like it’s Armageddon and his battered head is planet earth, and every tiny noise Peter makes, from shutting the window to setting down a mug of tea, is a personal affront.

What he doesn’t expect is for Carl to storm furiously into his bedroom, drag him naked from his bed and sock him squarely in the jaw.

The surprise slows his reflexes enough that he ends up face-down on the floor with the first punch, gasping and violently fighting the urge to vomit all over the landing as he blinks back stars. He struggles weakly to his knees, mind reeling, and sees Carl, breathing raggedly, setting his shoulder back, ready to swing another punch.

With a sudden burst of adrenaline and confused anger, Peter kicks his legs out wildly, slamming Carl in the knees and knocking him over, sending him tumbling with a painful-sounding crack onto the floor. Enraged, Carl makes a sound like an angry bull and throws himself forward, slamming Peter’s throbbing head down against the floorboards.

“You fuckin’ spastic, what the fuck are you doing?!” Peter finally howls, slapping Carl’s hands away as they try to pinion his wrists.

“The fuck is wrong with you?!” Carl screams back, in a way that makes Peter think that if he weren’t so heavily dehydrated, he’d probably be foaming at the mouth. “Fuck you, fuck you, you fucking cunt!” And with a surprisingly forceful backhand that rockets Peter’s head sideways, he scrambles to his feet and stamps away, leaving Peter gasping and heaving on the floor.

It’s only once Carl's gone - once Peter’s got a good look over his shoulder at the wide-eyed girl sitting up under the covers of his bed staring horrified back at him - that he realises he slept with Carl’s girlfriend.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The casualties of war,” Peter says, and he’s not quite caught his breath yet. 
> 
> Carl’s looking down at him, hair hanging greasy-soft and dark around his face. Peter stares back, and he feels like even his blood is itching under Carl’s gaze.

Peter knows that in the relatively short time he’s known Carl, he’s used up a lot of his second chances. 

He hasn’t been counting them, and he doesn’t know if there’s a finite number Carl is willing to let him have, but he thinks there must've been enough that, during his weepier moments of wallowing in booze-soaked melancholy, he gets the feeling that this time will be it. 

Carl doesn't always want to talk, and Peter can't always bring himself to make Carl want to talk. Instead, they do the only thing they really know how to do; they paper over the cracks between them with music, smothering the hatchet with melodies and lyrics suffused with passive-aggressive self-righteousness, bitterness and misunderstandings relegated to three-and-a-half minute bursts. 

Tonight, Peter's managed to convince Carl to get to writing some songs again. They’ve been picking painstakingly all evening through weeks of scribbled notes on flyaway scraps of paper, bound in notebooks and folded into their guitar cases, and they’ve argued about the provenance of almost all of them, unable to agree whose ideas are whose. 

The incident with Charlene hangs between them, unspoken. 

Carl hasn’t said a word about it. The withering looks full of loathing he throws at Peter tell well enough how Carl feels, but he won’t let Peter bring up the subject, or defend himself, or apologise, shoving his feet instead stubbornly deeper into the impasse.

The music that they’re trying to write is spiky, full of broken edges like a shattered beer bottle in a bar-fight, and Peter feels it scrape against his skin. The belligerence in Carl’s glances and the bitter undercurrent of his muttered words aren't enough to cause serious harm, but like splinters, they get wedged-in sharp, sore and irritating. 

Carl puts a cigarette between his lips, uncommunicative, mute, and Peter finds his fingers itching for something to deal with whatever’s happening between them; a smoke, a song, a fight, he doesn’t quite know. He wants to carry on writing. He needs more to drink. He wants Carl to stop being a moody bastard and do something that isn’t shrouded in unresponsive resentment. Talk to him. Shout at him. Anything.

“Give us one, then,” Peter says, into the tensing silence. 

“What?”

“Fag.” Peter holds his hand out and flexes his fingers expectantly. “Give us one.”

“Get yer own,” Carl says. He digs into his pocket, searching for his lighter. 

“Aw, fuck you, then.” Peter stands up. Blood rushes to his head, making his eyes swim for a second, and he feels whiskey-tinged warmness spread and seep into his limbs. He stumbles towards Carl, muscles shaky and tingling after being cross-legged on the wooden floor-slats for so long. 

“What’re you doing?” Carl asks, mocking laughter in his voice as he watches Peter edge along to the couch where Carl is sitting, holding onto it like a tightrope walker. His laughter stops abruptly when, stood in front of him, Peter swipes the cigarette directly from his lips. “Oi! Give it back, you wanker!”

“Take it,” Peter says, childishly, holding the cigarette out of reach. He’s all long limbs, head and shoulders above Carl’s compact height, and even unsteady on his drunken feet, he keeps his arm raised and taunting and too high for Carl. 

“Prick,” Carl mutters, but he doesn’t do himself the indignity of jumping for it, slumping instead further into the sofa. 

“Come on,” Peter needles, waving the cigarette in front of Carl’s increasingly infuriated face. “Don’t you want it?”

“Peter,” Carl says, and his voice is a warning.

“Carl,” Peter repeats, mocking. And then, holding the cigarette loosely between a thumb and forefinger, he bats Carl across the face with it. 

With a sudden furious flurry of movement, Carl lunges forward, tackling Peter at the waist, knocking him backwards and breathless onto the old couch that’s smattered with burn holes and black ink turned brown at the edges. 

“Alright, alright, you mad cunt,” Peter says on a gasp, as Carl grunts and twists Peter’s arms in his grip. They’ve drunk almost everything that was left in the flat throughout the evening, the bottom dredges of warm red wine, forgotten remnants of old whiskey, dusty gin from the back shelf, and he feels it now sloshing around his stomach in a nervous churn. “Carl. Carl, what the fuck, stop it! Stop it!”

Carl stops, knees astride Peter’s waist, a look of grim triumph about him. He swipes at Peter clumsily to take the cigarette back and goes to stick it into his mouth, but, leaden and ungainly from the drink, he fumbles and drops it to the floor. It rolls despondently under the sofa and out of sight. 

“Shit,” Carl says. “You made me lose it.”

“The casualties of war,” Peter says, and he’s not quite caught his breath yet. 

Carl’s looking down at him, hair hanging greasy-soft and dark around his face. Peter stares back, and he feels like even his blood is itching under Carl’s gaze. 

He leans up onto his elbows and kisses Carl on the lips. 

Carl freezes there, and Peter can hear him breathing shallowly in his throat, a ragged noise that sounds knotted and uncertain. Peter’s not sure if he wants Carl to kiss him back, or if he’s trying to provoke Carl into a fight somehow, but he knows that something has to give. 

Bolder, Peter brings his hand up to Carl’s neck, tacky and warm with sweat despite the cold of the room, scrunching his fingers in the hair at his nape. With a softly encouraging motion, he tilts Carl’s face to the side so their mouths come together better, and he hears Carl’s sharp inhale when Peter’s tongue touches his lips. 

Carl pulls away with a jerk. 

“Carl.” Peter scrabbles up to sitting, forcing Carl to lean back, sitting on Peter’s shins. 

“What – are you doing?” Carl’s face is blurry. There’s hurt in his eyes, for some reason, or perhaps it’s the querulous combination of alcohol in him giving him that sad, hangdog expression. 

Peter doesn’t really know how to answer that, so instead he says, “I’m sorry ‘bout Charlene.”

Carl blinks and stares dimly into Peter’s face, trying to follow the non-sequitur. Then his face hardens. “You’re fuckin’ not.”

Peter leans forward, and his hand winds itself in the collar of Carl’s t-shirt, grabbing a fistful of the stretched-out material. “I am,” he says earnestly, although he knows he’s sorrier for Carl being angry, than for the fact that he did something he doesn’t have any memory of at all. “Please. I was off my face, wasn’t I? Took too much of everything, I was – I can’t even remember—”

Carl grabs Peter’s hand and untangles it from his shirt, dropping it away from him back into Peter’s own lap. His face is scrunched up, like he’s really, truly upset behind the rigid disapproval. “You can’t just tell me it was the drugs that did it.”

“I didn’t exactly—”

“You did exactly.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“Bullshit,” Carl says angrily. “You’re not sorry at all.”

“Carl—” Peter leans forward. 

“And what are you—” Carl leans away as Peter puts his hand around Carl’s neck. “What is – why do you keep _doing_ this?”

Peter doesn't know why he keeps doing this, tugging at Carl, wanting him close, letting all the worst impulses of jealousy and possession tangle up his actions. Carl is everything to him, and every time he sees a crack he sticks his desperate fingers in and doesn’t see the damage until he comes away with blood under his nails. 

He wants to kiss Carl like he would a girl, a lover, someone he was in love with, someone who was angry at him, to soothe them, to say sorry, to use actions when he can’t find the words. 

Carl is the person who knows him best. He should _understand_ , even if Peter doesn’t.

Peter grabs at Carl again as Carl jerks back from him, and the momentum pulls Carl forward more forcefully than Peter had meant to, bashing their noses against each other, mashing their mouths together in a painful clack of teeth and split lips.

He only has a moment to register the unexpected pain, before he’s suddenly reeling from another sharp shock as Carl’s flailing arm smacks him across the face. 

“What is _wrong_ with you?” Carl says, furiously, scrabbling off the sofa to his feet, wiping at his mouth, glowering down at Peter. “Fuck’s sake. Fuck _this_. I’m going out.” He turns on his heel and stumbles angrily out of the door, leaving it open behind him. 

In his wake, everything feels curiously quiet. The sounds of the city are muffled and still, no heavy footsteps from the neighbours or creaking floorboards and rattling windows. Peter rubs his stinging face, licking his lip and tasting blood.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A pause stretches out between them. Carl’s hand is still around Peter’s wrist. Peter can feel a heartbeat under his palm, and he’s overcome suddenly with the knowledge of what he’s about to do, like it isn’t even really his decision.

“I’d like to go to Paris,” Carl is saying. 

“Why?” the girl says, threading her fingers through his hair. “Everyone thinks it is so _romantic_.” The word comes out with derision. “I have left. I do not want to go back.”

Peter watches them. They’re in a small, dim flat on Mile End road, filled with a group of degenerate twenty-somethings milling about the kitchen and corridor. The flat belongs to two French girls, friends of friends who know someone who knows someone who invited them in. Which is why Peter’s here, in the bedroom, on the bed, legs tangled in bedsheets and feet.

Carl’s been attending a lot of parties, recently, a good handful of which Peter doesn’t get invited to. Carl’s easily-led, Peter knows; strung along by sycophants and trendies who stroke his ego and get him drunk, filling his head with rotten promises. Peter’s resentful; not jealous of the attention, but bitter because in the dark parts of himself, Peter wants the only person able to reassure Carl of his brilliance to be _him_. 

They haven’t spoken much, recently. The Charlene thing, their fights and undiscussed kisses, all of it grows in meaning the more they leave it alone, stewing in unexamined resentment. Peter finds his thoughts and feelings crammed in a suffocating build-up of layers like limescale in his head, a heavy calcification of problems he can’t unpick.

The girl in Carl's lap now is wearing an oversized jumper that slips off her shoulder, leaving her neck and collarbones exposed. She’s got gold rings on every finger, the cheap kind that go green and make your skin smell like cold copper coins. She speaks broken English slowly, in a low and lazy voice. 

Carl doesn’t speak a word of French, save some appallingly-remembered bits from a Gainsbourg record he sometimes plays, but it hadn’t seemed to matter to the girl, who sat across his lap in delight at his mumbled _viens-la, chérie_ , and had kissed him, black hair swinging forward like curtains to hide them from view. 

She says to Carl, now, “London is more exciting, isn’t it?”

“Dunno,” Carl mumbles, and he looks dazed, drunk, a little disbelieving that this exceptionally pretty girl, with her low voice and brown eyes, is here with him, sitting on his knees. She kisses him again, short and quick and with teeth, and between breaths Carl says, “Yeah, I guess so.”

Peter’s eyes feel itchy and dry, his head alcohol-soaked and sloppy. The girl’s knee is digging into his thigh, carelessly, and there’s a smoking joint in an ashtray giving off low-hanging grey clouds of smoke, blurring everyone’s edges. He feels a little lost, ignored, like he’s become part of the chintzy patterned pillows scattered all about the lumpy mattress they’re all lying on. 

Carl’s eyes are fixed on the girl, while her gaze roves from the white of Carl’s neck to the artex patterns on the nicotine-stained ceiling. No one’s looking at Peter. 

“I didn’t like living in Paris,” the girl says, her words half-lost in the collar of Carl’s shirt. “It was not for me. I like it here, instead.”

“Well, _bienvenue_ to London,” Peter interrupts, perhaps more brusquely than he’d meant to, and both Carl and the girl finally look over at him. Peter toasts the air towards them with his teacup filled to the brim with gin and warm tonic water, and it slops over his wrist and fingers. “ _That great sea whose ebb and flow at once is deaf and loud, and on the shore—_ ” 

“Oh, here we go,” Carl mutters.

“ _—On the shore_ ,” Peter continues loudly, “ _vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more_ …” He looks at Carl, pointedly.

The girl is glancing between them, a little confused but possibly too drunk to mind. Peter’s really quite drunk himself, and his thoughts are a wet, disjointed mess, but he remembers the lines of poetry easily, picking them out like shining gold threads from the quagmire. The words hang incomplete.

“Oh for— _yet in its depths, what treasures_ ,” Carl suddenly finishes, rolling his eyes hard enough to strain. 

“Thank you, Carlos, that was magnificent,” Peter says, with a bitterness he can’t quite keep from his voice. He goes back to his teacup. It’s significantly less full than it was a moment ago, and the tonic water’s only got warmer. He keeps drinking it anyway. 

“Are you a poet?” the girl asks. 

“Yes,” Peter says.

“He likes to think he is,” Carl says, and his tone isn't really lighthearted enough for Peter not to feel the jab. 

“I write poetry, I’m a poet,” Peter insists. “What else would you call it?”

“Talking absolute shite, most of the time.” He’s half-joking, but Carl still sounds like he means it, glancing at the girl, expecting a laugh.

“Ah, stop that,” she murmurs, pushing Carl’s shoulder. 

“Thank you,” Peter says to her, graciously. He tilts his head as he looks her over. She’s a kind of home-made beauty, in that way French girls are, with thick hair and olive skin and a smile full of teeth that push out against her red lips. “You’re very pretty, y’know.”

Carl snorts. “ _Poetry_.”

“Alright well if you’re going to be such a cunt about it—” Peter starts to sit up, gin spilling from his teacup as he pushes himself off the bed in a huff. He’s not in the mood for Carl’s jibes. He dislikes watching Carl like this, inauthentic, deliberately and flippantly cruel, the falsities of his posturing obvious and blinding to Peter – and all to impress another person, another girl, someone who doesn’t even matter.

“Hey,” Carl says, and he sits up quickly, jostling the girl as he does so. He grabs hold of Peter’s wrist. “Come on, what’s got into you?”

“Let go,” Peter says, shaking his arm. He’s not very strong. Carl’s stronger; wiry with suppressed energy where Peter is soft and mostly sad. 

“Look, fucking hell,” Carl says, and he pulls Peter back down onto the bed next to him. Peter stumbles as he’s tugged down, putting a hand out to steady himself. “I’m sorry, alright? Jesus.”

Peter’s hand is on Carl’s chest, flattened over the solar plexus. He doesn’t think Carl knows exactly what he’s apologising for, but considering his own actions recently, Peter’s not really in a position to take the moral highground. “S’alright,” he says. Carl’s eyes lock onto his. 

Around them, the party’s wound down, heavy and smoky and sleepy as late-night conversations in the kitchen drift in drabs of broken voices under the door, but the air in the bedroom is quiet and still in a strange anticipation that seems to have come from nowhere, pulsing and thick and suffocating. Anticipation of what, Peter’s not sure. All he knows is that he feels curiously distant, like his body’s floated off, tugged down a river on a current he can’t control, helpless to the inevitability of the situation.

A pause stretches out between them. Carl’s hand is still around Peter’s wrist. Peter can feel a heartbeat under his palm, and he’s overcome suddenly with the knowledge of what he’s about to do, like it isn’t even really his decision. 

Carl doesn’t move away when Peter leans forward to kiss him. 

No one speaks a word. The girl is still, and Carl is silent. The hush between them is huge, and heavy. Peter feels it push against him with every rustle of skin, every swallowed sound and shallow breath, empty of words, unformed by thought.

Peter feels Carl’s breath in his mouth, lips warm and bitter with gin as they kiss. They tremble in hesitation each time Peter touches them with his own, but he doesn’t give Carl a chance to pull away, to fracture the moment with a word of protest, of consideration, of concern. They’re slipping along a warm current of whiskey and gin, heady fumes of heat and want thickening the air, as their lips come apart and back together with quiet, wet sounds in the small bedroom.

Peter feels it in the pit of his stomach and the root of his spine – desperation and desire, and a curious sense of terror, too; fearful suddenly that if he stops for even one second, if he allows either of them time to think, something unmendable will break.

There’s something happening, something different to their other short kisses, those drunken incidents and moments shared in the sick hue of a bad comedown, or the wake of a fight. They have an audience, now; the girl, watching from behind Carl, taking the blur of a confused moment away from them and making it sharper, realer – harder to ignore, but maybe easier to explain, if Peter were interested in the need for reasoning. He suspects Carl is. 

And then the girl moves, her fingers going to Carl’s chest, slipping over the wrinkles of fabric in his shirt, down to the top of his jeans. His button there is already undone. As she pulls on his zip, it rasps loud and obvious in the quiet room. 

Peter’s not looking, but he knows when the girl’s hand has found its target. Carl’s mouth goes slack under Peter’s, and his breath comes out harsh and his head pushes back into the pillow as the rest of him goes rigid with tension. On the edge of his voice comes a ragged gasp. 

Peter feels a spike of want go straight through him, making his muscles weak and his dick hard. He moves his hand blindly down Carl’s chest, fingers snagging at the undone buttons as he kisses him relentlessly, as if a seamless continuation of their mouths together will keep Carl from protesting or stopping him. His hand bumps the girl’s slim fingers, pushes them out of the way, and he feels damp heat under tight denim. 

“No, wait, fuck—” And suddenly Carl is out of reach and on his feet, stood up against the peeling wallpaper, breathing heavy. Peter can see his bare stomach moving under his open shirt. He’s hard in his jeans. 

“Eh ben, merde,” the girl says. 

“This is—” Carl’s eyes look a little wild, unfocused and wet from alcohol, and his lips are red-bitten and shiny. Peter wants him. Whatever other emotions are crowding the moment, he can feel that one hard and fast like a punch to the gut. “I can’t – I mean, _fuck_ , Peter.” Carl tugs at his hair, scrunches a handful of it between his fingers, distress clenching his hands. “I’ve got to go.”

“Don’t go,” the girl says, and she’s a little wild-eyed too. Peter feels sorry for her, then, embroiled for a brief moment in something that ought to be sorted, if he were sensible about it, between Carl and himself. 

But Carl’s already tugging his shoes on, boots sagging unlaced around his ankles, shrugging on his leather jacket as he tries to button up his shirt with clumsy, embarrassed hands, and then he’s headed for the door without a single look back. 

“For fuck’s sake – Carl!” Peter calls, stumbling to his feet, too. He’s got a fucking hard-on and his limbs are shot full of pins and needles. He goes to the door, gives the girl an insubstantially apologetic mumble, then chases Carl down the stairs and out onto the street. “Carl!” he shouts again. “Fucking – fuck, _fuck_ – Carl, fucking stop it, I’ve got no shoes on!”

Carl stops moving for a second, glancing over his shoulder at Peter. His face is a mess of things Peter can’t begin to unravel, sloshed as he is on gin and soft in the head from lust. “Go away,” Carl says, tiredly. “I’m going home.”

“So? I’m coming too.”

Carl looks down at Peter’s feet. His toes are curved in against the cold, and pockmarked with gravel. “You’ve not got any shoes.”

“There’s other shoes at home.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not – there are!” Peter spreads his arms wide. He forgot his jacket, too, and the cold air swoops across his bare skin. He knows this is not an argument about shoes, but he just doesn’t know what to say. “When’s the bus? Let’s take the bus.”

“No,” Carl says, through gritted teeth. “Go back. Get your fucking shoes. I’m going home.”

“And I’m coming with you!”

“Then I’m fucking going somewhere else!” Carl bursts out. 

Peter blinks. “Where?”

“Gary’s – fuckin’, John’s, wherever, I don’t care.” Carl’s face is crumpled behind stringy bits of hair. He’s sad-looking, and Peter wishes he knew why, but the pathways to sense and reason in his head are all scuffed-up. “Just leave me alone, _fuck_.”

Peter feels something cold and hard leech out in his chest. “Why?”

“Because – fuck, because!” Carl shouts, hands smacking about the empty air as he waves his arms, clutching vainly at nothing. “Because whatever you’re playing at, it’s fucked up!”

Peter blinks. He feels frozen all over. Even his eyelashes feel stiff. “I’m not playing at anything.”

“Yeah, all this—” Carl jerks a thumb over his shoulder, back at the shabby Mile End flat lit up on all sides by falsely welcoming kebab-shop signs. The midnight crowd’s dissipated as it comes on four in the morning, and those left braving the early hours are too drunk to pay attention to the burgeoning fight on the dirty pavement. “All this shit you’re always pulling – fucking, fucking things up like you can’t stand me doing something that’s not – that you’re not a part of.”

“That’s not—”

“It is, it fuckin’ is! I walked out on that job ‘cos of you. You _fucked my girlfriend_. And then you pull this shit – whatever that was, just now, because—” Carl throws his hands out, a helpless gesture of complete incomprehension. “I don’t know. You just – don’t want me to have her to myself, is that it? _You_ want her?” He stops and swallows. “You want _me_?”

Peter’s mouth moves soundlessly over his words, but nothing comes up except the sourly fearful taste of bile. 

Carl sighs. “Fucked up,” he mumbles, like the fragment of that thought is all he’s got left. He turns away to leave, and Peter feels a terror grip him. 

“Carl,” he says, hands flying out to close steely-fingered around Carl’s arm. “Carl,” and he drags the words out from someplace that’s flooding rapidly with despair. “I’m sorry.”

Carl’s expression flickers, but his mouth stays a hard, sad line. “I’m gonna go,” he mumbles eventually, and, as easily as Peter had always dreaded it would be, he walks away.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter sits up gingerly, but a vicious spasm in his side makes him double up and retch again, though there’s nothing to bring up but a wet cough and a burning in his eyes. He clutches his stomach, breathing hard and shallow through his nose, and thinks it wouldn’t be unreasonable just to lie down and cry until the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for some violence (nothing too graphic), mentions of blood, and allusions to self-harm. No actual non-con but we're skirting close to it.

There’s a park behind the church in Shoreditch, and Peter’s sitting on a bench alone. 

It’s barely a park, really; the place is made up of two grassy banks and a gravel path, hidden by its skewed angle behind a set of exhaust-choked trees and the featureless back of empty warehouse buildings. It’s a quietly bleak environment; the occasional haggard-looking urban fox the only signs of life here late at night. 

It’s a shit place to spend an evening. He’s supposed to be at a party. He _was_ at a party, but he wandered off twenty minutes ago with half a mind to go find some more booze when the party started running dry. He was on his way to the late-night offie across the road, but he took a detour into the park instead because the oily strip-lighting and suspicious gaze of the shopkeeper in _Mags & Fags_ on account of his holey-toed trainers and bloodshot eyes suddenly seemed particularly unbearable; and going back into the chaos of the party he’d just left even more so. 

Peter kicks his toes in the dead, overgrown grass. There are brown patches burnt by winter frost, and great wads of upturned earth where someone at some point must have considered planting flowers. The only marks of colour around here come from empty Monster Munch packets and sticky cans of Special Brew emerging half-trodden from the ground. 

It’s a sad fucking place, but Peter finds it fitting; he’s in a maudlin, sullen mood, and he finds some satisfaction in matching his surroundings. 

He thinks about going home. There’s probably beer in the fridge, and despite the broken, whistling windows, it’d be warmer there than here, freezing his arse off on a graffiti-riddled bench in the middle of a park in February. Carl’s been missing for the last four days, so the flat’d be depressingly empty, but it’s not like he’s having much of a riot here alone, either. 

Fucking Carl. He could be dead in a ditch for all he cares about letting Peter know where he’s gone. 

There’s a creeping sense of fear that shudders through Peter every time he considers the possibility that Carl could be gone for good, but he also can’t quite tamp down the vicious, angry resentment that blooms up in him every time he remembers Carl’s retreating back. Walking away. Abandoning ship. 

A voice breaks into Peter’s morose thoughts, startling him. “You alright, son?”

Peter turns around, and sees a guy stood there, paunchy and wrapped up in a shabby raincoat, hands in his pockets. He’s looking down at Peter, his bland, grey face neutral, casual – as if he has no reason or agenda for loitering in the dark alone this late at night. 

“Fine, mate,” Peter says. He looks up and down the park. No one else in sight. Peter realises he must make quite a picture; a sad, lonesome figure against this dismal, urban backdrop, fey and wan in the barely-there lamplight, wrapped in a tattered old jacket that hangs off his skinny frame, looking for all the world like a Dickensian ragamuffin who doesn’t half seem desperate to make a quid or two. 

The man’s edging closer, a chubby Fagin with unpleasant interest in his pouchy eyes. 

Peter’s not interested in spooling out the rest of _that_ narrative, though, so he pushes himself to his feet - but a lot of drink throughout the night has made his limbs a drunken, cumbersome weight, so he stumbles over as he stands. 

“Woah,” the guy says, stepping forward to steady him. “Careful, there.” 

Peter snorts and tries to move away. The guy’s fumbling hands skid over his chest, too exploratory to be innocent, and Peter’s well aware of how _that_ story goes. “Fuck off,” he says. He tugs his arm away and the guy’s hand falls off him, only to come straight back up to grip his shoulder. 

“Only trying to help.”

“Don’t need help,” Peter says, shaking the man off again. “I’m going home.”

“Well, where’s home? I can take you there.”

The man’s face has a few wrinkles in it, but his expression is otherwise smooth. Unthreatening. Almost reasonable. Peter shivers. “M’alright,” he mutters, and he tries to step past the guy, but he finds his path blocked as the man steps directly in front of him. He looks bigger, up close, more substantial, and Peter feels himself shrinking, a tinge of fear suddenly in him. 

“Come on,” the man says. His breath is on Peter’s face. It doesn’t smell of anything, but Peter recoils from the unpleasant dampness of it anyway. “You look like you’re about to fall over. I can help.”

“Go away,” Peter says, and he tries to step past again, but he’s blurry and uncoordinated and immobilised suddenly by the man’s grip on his upper arm. 

“I just want to give you a hand,” the man says. 

Peter feels a tangle of hysteria rising in his chest. “I know you do, mate,” he says, trying to free himself. “I’m not interested.”

“You sure?” The man reaches down and touches between Peter’s legs. 

Peter jerks violently away. “I’m not – get the fuck off me,” he croaks. He feels the drugs and booze and fear and bile rising up in him in a soggy sick cocktail. 

“Come on.” The man doesn’t loosen his hold. “How much do you want?”

“I’ve told you, I—” Peter feels his stomach give a lurch. “Fucking – let go of me. M’going to fucking vomit on you, I swear, s’not a fuckin’ joke.” But the man doesn’t let go, reaching instead with his other hand for his jacket pocket. 

Peter doesn’t wait to find out if the man’s going for his wallet or a fucking knife or something; he brings a knee up swiftly and crunches the guy right in the balls.

The man crumples, hand letting go of Peter as he gasps out a pained howl, and Peter seizes his opportunity to escape, but in his blundering drunkenness he misjudges the edge of the grassy verge onto the gravel path and slips, ankle buckling as he falls to his knees, scraping his hands in the dirt. 

He has a moment of blank shock, feeling a curious nothingness for a brief instant, before a burst of blooming pain explodes in his stomach. It almost seems to him like the impact comes afterwards, the sense-feedback firing confusedly in his brain, until he gets another kick in the stomach, and then the ribs, then the side of his head, and the relation between the pain and the blows becomes an indistinguishable loop. He crumples in on himself, hands sticky with scrapes and prickly with gravel, covering his face as he cries out.

Then the kicking stops, and he hears footsteps recede. 

Peter gasps, coughing, and he can only just bring himself to roll over weakly and retch violently onto the pathway, before collapsing back onto his side, his breath thick and wet in the confined space between his face and his hands. 

When he wakes up again, he’s shivering from the cold, head a mashed-up mess of pain and boozy confusion. He touches his face. He thinks something must have split somewhere because there’s wet blood running down his cheek, slippery on his neck, a strange counterpoint to the tight pull of dried blood and scabby skin on the surface of his hands and knees. He’s lucky, maybe, that there’s still too much booze and pills in his system to let him acknowledge all the pain at once. He knows it’ll come, though, scraping at his bones and muscles and ready to hammer into full force by the morning. 

He sits up gingerly, but a vicious spasm in his side makes him double up and retch again, though there’s nothing to bring up but a wet cough and a burning in his eyes. He clutches his stomach, breathing hard and shallow through his nose, and thinks it wouldn’t be unreasonable just to lie down and cry until the morning. 

He does cry, for a bit, mostly from exhaustion, a terrible headache and the adrenaline comedown. Then, when his sore eyes are all dried out from the whistling cold wind, he wipes his face with a dirty, bloody hand, and makes an attempt at standing up. It takes him three goes and a lot of whimpering, but he eventually makes it to his feet, and down the road to the bus-stop. 

Peter gets back to the flat forty minutes later, his nose cold and running, and it comes out sticky pink with blood when he wipes it on the back of his hand. He shivers, shaken and sickly, and fumbles with the latch on the door that never properly works. 

Inside, the lights are all off, and Peter feels the realisation that Carl isn’t home hit him as hard as any kick from the maniac in the park. Carl’s absence now feels sharply upsetting; pointed and purposeful and cruelly unkind. 

Peter feels his eyes sting. He’s tired down to his bones, feeling the worst scrapings of a comedown on the inside of his skull, exposing all the saddest, sorest parts of his thoughts, and on top of that everything in his body hurts with a steadily growing insistence, like a nettle burn flaring hotly inside his skin. 

He finds a can of beer at the back of the fridge, and takes it to the bathroom. He closes the toilet lid and sits down, cracking the beer open and quickly sucking down the froth, swilling it about in his mouth to flush out the sour taste of vomit. He flexes a hand in front of him, looking at the raw scratches on his palms, and the dirty grey grit embedded in the scrapes. 

He stands, and goes to look at himself in the mirror above the sink. His reflection looks grimly back at him, a scraped and dirty forehead leaking brown-rust blood down the side of his face, and a puffy swelling around his cheekbone and top lip. He stretches his mouth wide in a grimace, and feels his lip crack, a swell of blood oozing from the cut. He takes another sip of beer, licking away the metal tang. 

He hears a door slam inside the flat, and his hand jerks at the noise, heart beating suddenly fast. Then there’s a pattering of footsteps, heavy on the stairs and then lighter on the landing. He waits, gripping the edge of the sink. In the bathroom mirror he can see out of the open door behind him, into the empty corridor beyond. He holds his breath.

And then the footsteps stamp back down the stairs. The door rattles, creaks on its hinge, and slams shut again, the clack of Carl's boots on tarmac fading away. 

Peter stays still for a moment, staring in the mirror until his eyes burn and blur and turn his reflection into a filthy, ghostly smudge. Then he punches the bathroom cabinet.

The damp wood cracks unsatisfyingly under his knuckles; he’s not even got the strength to smash it up properly, like he'd like to. All he gets is the cuts on his skin splitting open again, dripping an ooze of blood over the back of his hand. 

Peter sits down heavily on the edge of the scummy bath and watches it run down his wrist and into the crack of his elbow, dripping into bright little patterns on the bathroom floor. Then when it stops running, he picks some more at the scabby skin on his arms, his chest, vicious and pathetic under the sickly yellow light, dabbing a finger into the new swell of blood that thickens in the refreshed wounds. 

He’s not even sure what he’s doing or why he’s doing it as he smears red over the rim of the sink, and then fingerpaints it onto the mirror. His head is a mashed-up mess, and there’s something grimly satisfying in it all; raw evidence of something that wasn't, for once, all his fault. 

He goes to bed four fags and a half-bottle of gin later, crawling still wearing his jeans and socks under the covers. He’s wiped some of the blood off his face and arms with damp bits of toilet paper that he’s left wadded up and leaking a wet, pinkish tinge on the floor of the bathroom. He’s too cold to take a shower, too sore to clean the dirt from the cracks in his skin, and he’s too drunk to stand upright anymore.

It’s the early hours of morning now, and he feels himself drifting in exhaustion, but the pain in his ribs and head keeps spiking insistently, keeping him just on the verge between sleep and wakefulness. He feels tears, suddenly, unbidden, leak out of the corner of his eyes – a delayed reaction from the fear, a response to the pain, a pitiful woefulness at his own misfortune and suffering, or maybe just tiredness, he doesn’t know. 

He misses Carl. Peter squeezes his eyes shut.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What,” Carl says, his enunciation for once crystal-clear, “the hell is going on?”
> 
> Peter imagines there’s a multitude of correct and incorrect answers to that question, and it feels like picking through landmines to get to the right one, so he just says, carefully, “What d’you mean?”

It’s been six days, now, and Carl’s still not been back to the flat. He’s missing from the front, a deserter, the lost soldier gone AWOL, slipped away in the night and disintegrated into nothing but the words his left-behind comrades remember him by, a footnote in a poem. 

Peter ought to have him shot for cowardice. 

Since his altercation in the park, Peter’s not made any attempt to clean the bathroom of any evidence of his sad descent into filthy self-pity. There’s bloodied wads of tissue paper still lying around, and rust-coloured fingerprints on the mirror, and he’s left his dirty clothes in the bath, as if he can confine all the bad feelings into one close-doored room, like a roped-off crime scene. 

If it weren’t for the fact that he’s spent the whole morning outside in abject misery getting soaked in a downpour, he would be dirty enough to be indistinguishable from a gutter rat. As it is, the rain’s washed some of the filth away, although, wet through as he is now, he feels even sorrier for himself.

In his room, Peter pulls on a dry jumper and gets under the covers of his bed in his underwear and socks, shivering in relentless spasms like a sickly, febrile patient. There’s a shattered rattling in his head, like fragments of skull have come loose. 

He pulls his notebook out from under his pillow and clicks his pen between his teeth, then presses the end of the pen into his temple. He feels his pulse there, fluttering weakly at the surface of his skin, a hollow beat that blooms like wet ink on paper, tendrils inching out to touch the edges of a space that's shaped indelibly like _Carl._

He can’t write anything down; the words won’t come. There’s a maudlin sentimentality oozing thickly through him, he’s exhausted, and more than a little drunk for two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. He throws his notebook to the foot of his bed, lying down and turning over to face the wall, falling into a fretful sleep. 

It doesn’t last long before he’s woken up by the smashing of a door on its hinges. 

In the empty smudge of the dark doorway, Carl stands, blue eyes flint-sharp and narrowed, hand curled, as is often the case with Carl, into a taut and angry fist. Peter sits up, and feels all the booze in his system wash warmly up to his head. 

“What,” Carl says, his enunciation for once crystal-clear, “the fuck is going on?”

Peter imagines there’s a multitude of correct and incorrect answers to that question, and it feels like picking through landmines to get to the right one, so he just says, carefully, “What d’you mean?”

Carl strides into the room, and the door bashes into the white-washed dry-wall again, sending a flurry of dust into the air and to the floor. He gets to his knees in front of Peter’s mattress and grabs the front of his jumper. Peter flinches, expecting a punch or a shove or some impact to his tender face, but Carl only uses the leverage to drag Peter closer to him, and puts his other hand on Peter’s chin, turning his head roughly sideways. His mouth is tight as he asks, “What happened to you?”

“Had a fight,” Peter says, into his own shoulder. 

“Jesus.” Carl puts a finger against the purple-red bruise on Peter’s cheekbone. “You have a fight with a fuckin’ cheese grater? You’re all scraped up.” 

“Fell over,” Peter says. “Trying to run away.”

“From who?”

“This guy who tried to pay me for a blowjob. Or a handjob. I dunno exactly.”

“Christ, why were you—”

“I told him I didn’t do that,” Peter says. “I mean, not anymore.” The half-joke lands flat.

Carl lets go of Peter, and he sinks to sitting on the edge of the bed, like all the air’s gone out of him. “Has anyone told you you’re a fuckin’ idiot?” he asks, grimly.

“’Scuse me, I’m a fuckin’ _invalid_ ,” Peter says, and he tugs at the bottom of his jumper, lifting it up. He hasn’t managed to get a good look at what’s under there, but he imagines it’s not a pretty sight, considering how much his ribs are still killing him. “Yeah,” he says, almost smugly, when Carl flinches away at the sight. “Kicked about by some cunt like a football just ‘cos I wouldn’t let him stick his hand in me trousers.”

Carl swallows. His eyes dart to Peter’s stomach, then away when Peter drops his jumper to cover the worst of the bruising. “You should go to the hospital.”

Peter shrugs. “S’fine. Made of sterner stuff, the old kit n' caboodle.”

“Christ.” Carl rubs his hands over his face, and he looks raggedy, hair limp from the rain, stained jacket and the pungent-strong smell of beer and fags on his breath, and Peter realises he’s missed him so much, it almost feels like a punch in the guts again. Carl peers out at Peter from between his fingers. “I thought you’d – I thought – for fuck’s sake.” He gestures back at the door, towards the landing where the bathroom is. “Blood everywhere, you _wanker_.”

“I meant to clean it,” Peter lies. 

“No, you meant to give me a heart attack,” Carl says, and there’s a thin, sad strain to his voice. 

Peter feels a stirring of shame, then, at the ugly transparency with which he did what he did - and a stirring of a sick kind of pleasure, too, hapless and desperately grateful, at how well Carl knows him. 

“Carl,” Peter says. “Carl, I’m sorry, I swear. I wasn’t trying to— I’m a mess, I know.” Carl snorts. Peter knee-walks closer to Carl, and loops an arm around his neck, putting their foreheads together. “I’m sorry. I know I fucked up. I always fuck up. I am a fuck-up. I’ve – I’ve gone about it all the wrong way, haven’t I? I have, I have.” He’s babbling, but he can’t stop the spillage of words. “Carl – Carlos. You know why, don’t you? You know?” He winds desperate fingers into Carl’s hair. Carl’s mouth is still an unhappy line, and close-up, his eyes are a dark, wet smudge. “You have to know,” Peter whispers, and he kisses him. 

For once, Carl doesn’t jerk away. For once, Carl kisses him back with all the strength and purpose that Peter wants from him, fierce and furious and heated. Peter takes the kiss with desperate satisfaction, arm tightening around Carl’s neck, a sound escaping him that’s both pleased and needful. Carl tastes of liquor and smoke and his teeth bite Peter’s lips, kissing him with almost punishing roughness as he puts an arm around Peter’s waist and pulls him in forcefully. 

“Fuck, jesus,” Peter hisses, breaking away, and he clamps a palm to his right-hand ribcage. It hurts there, the fragile knit of his bones jostled and sore, but then he looks up and sees Carl’s blurry, reproachful eyes, and he swallows the pain down. 

He pulls Carl back to him, fingers snarled into Carl’s hair, bunching into a fist as he steers Carl’s head to angle a deeper kiss, all tongue and teeth and a raw scrape of skin. His other hand goes to his waist, pushing Carl’s t-shirt up, until his hand is on hot skin, and he feels his own skin flush warmly at the touch. 

When he presses Carl down onto the mattress there’s only a moment of resistance, smoothed away when Peter’s hand sweeps over Carl’s chest and over his belly, making Carl’s skin jump under the touch and push back into the mattress with a groan. 

Lying on the bed, Carl’s hair is a halo of straggling black strands, stark against the white sheets. There’s smudges of rust-coloured blood around him, too, and it’s filthy and shocking and mad, but it’s also poetic; Carl’s body and his blood, fitting and perversely satisfying, Peter muses, though he stamps on the thought with a twinge of disgusted self-awareness. He just twines himself to Carl’s side, chest against Carl’s ribcage, thigh between Carl’s furiously tense legs, and he kisses him like he’s trying to steal his breath. 

The racket of London traffic and pelting rain against the window-panes fills the room with a constant tumble of sound, but they otherwise stay silent. There’s only the harshness of Carl’s breathing, the clicks in his throat as he swallows, the wet noise of his mouth and the creaking leather of his jacket. And then, a ragged gasp, as Peter pushes his hand, shaking and uncoordinated, into Carl’s jeans and around his cock.

It feels like a revelation, the way Carl arches as he touches him, the bow of his back and the stuttered moan that gets strangled halfway out of his throat. Peter’s drunk enough that everything has a distant blurriness to it, but there’s a realness to the feel of Carl in his hand that fills him both with a kind of fierce joy and a strange terror.

Peter’s arm aches, and he feels the acid burn of over-exertion as he jerks his hand, but he doesn’t dare slow down or stop, desperate somehow to keep Carl cleaved to him, their chests pushed against each other, moving back and forth alternately as their breath comes harsh and shallow together, Carl’s knees in a vice-grip around Peter’s legs, his arms coming down around Peter’s back. 

Peter goes to kiss him again, mouth red-sore and wet, but Carl tears himself away and shoves his face into Peter’s neck instead. His hair is in Peter’s mouth, and Peter feels half-choked by the heat and sensations around him but he still doesn’t stop, twisting his hand slippery with sweat and fluid around Carl as he bucks and arches, fingers digging hard into Peter’s shoulders, until he comes, hot and wet in Peter’s fist without a word. 

Breathing hard and trembling, Peter tugs his hand from between them, inadvertently wiping sweat and come across the front of his own jeans and his belly where his t-shirt’s rucked up. He feels like he’s burning, Carl’s breath on his neck triggering a looping feedback of arousal that courses through him. He’s desperately hot, sweat prickling under his arms and between his thighs as he squirms, hips grinding in minute, desperate motions against Carl, now still and silent between his legs.

Carl’s dick is softening in the peeled-back V of his open jeans, and Peter can see the fog of arousal rolling away from him, and he’s scared, suddenly, in the aftermath of what they’ve done. He surges up to kiss Carl again, desperately, a way to keep the curt words and questions at bay, and Carl doesn’t stop him. Peter pushes a hand still wet with spunk into his own jeans to touch himself, and Carl doesn’t stop him. He comes with his lips on Carl’s mouth and his own breathing loud to his ears, and Carl doesn’t stop him. 

There’s a moment, after, of nothing but the sound of rain, and the wailing of a siren expanding and fading down the street. 

“Okay?” is all Peter can bring himself to say, once he’s caught his breath. His thoughts have all scattered apart, leaving nothing but a strange, blank uncertainty behind, vapour trails after the roar of a jet engine. 

Carl swallows. “Okay,” he says. They fall silent, and Peter finds himself helpless to the tug of exhaustion as he drifts away in the grey afternoon light, arm curled up on a pillow, Carl motionless beside him. 

When he wakes up a few hours later, it’s dark in the room, and Carl’s no longer there. 

Peter curls up into the empty space he’s left behind, tired and in pain, and goes back to sleep.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carl is silent, his face half in his knees, eyebrows furrowed as he stares out at the river.
> 
> Peter’s heartbeat is thick with anxiety, and his hands are cold from the fear of teetering on the edge of his confession. He swallows, and says, “You know I was in love with you from the start.”

Peter’s sister was the one who introduced him to Carl first. Carl Barât, _this guy_ on her drama course at Brunel, he was special, worth meeting, someone Peter would find kinship with, she was sure, she knew what Peter was like. 

It was an assessment Peter had initially been confused by when he finally met the fabled Carl _Ashley Raphael_ Barât, unimpressed by the silent, self-conscious boy in front of him and surprised by his sister’s uncharacteristic misjudgement.

Carl Barat was good-looking, that was true enough. He was all Joe Strummer in his nonchalant sex-appeal, a Paul Newman kind of pretty, too, old Hollywood in his face and lips, and a little James Dean in the attitude as he stood there with his faded leather jacket and jutted jaw.

Peter knew he wasn’t much to look at himself, with the yellow nails of a serial smoker and the crooked teeth of a Dickensian villain. He had charm, wide eyes and a silver tongue, but he was the scuff of graffiti in a dirty alleyway to Carl’s oil-on-canvas Masterpiece. Carl Barat’s eyes were the kind of blue that got written about in love songs, his mouth the kind poets composed odes for. It was easy to be beguiled on first sight. 

But Carl was difficult to get along with; spiky and uncommunicative, his flint-bright blue eyes hidden behind dark hair spilling from a horrible ponytail, he’d been wholly reluctant to open too easily to Peter that first day. He’d also seemed determined to keep his leather jacket on, despite the unusual warmth. He’d smoked and mumbled and laughed a bit at Peter’s stories, but seemed to catch himself before doing or saying too much, anchoring himself valiantly instead to the strings of the guitar on his lap from which he teased soft ringlets of melody. 

Peter had been a mediocre musician at the time; his playing extending only to a handful of half-memorised songs, but he had lyrics forming everywhere from his fingertips to the underside of his tongue and he’d always thought it was better to have three chords and a lot of heart than all technique and no passion, anyway. 

The look on Carl’s face, however, when Peter lifted the acoustic from his hands and butchered a simple progression was the first crack in the fortress – he’d looked genuinely offended, which had made Peter laugh, and, suddenly sparked into a reaction, Carl had scrambled over to sit beside Peter and correct him.

Carl’s leather jacket was creaking and sticking to Peter’s bare arm, unseasonal heat prickling Peter’s skin with sweat. Carl’s breath was warm on his neck, and even though his hands were ungentle and exasperated as they tugged Peter’s across the guitar fret, Peter still felt the little jump-kick of his heart at the proximity. They’d been drinking a fair bit all afternoon, so he didn’t think twice about leaning back and kissing Carl on the lips. 

Carl had let him, for a moment, an elasticated few seconds stretching out in the silence of the room, until he’d pulled away with a frown, as if he’d just watched someone else doing something that he didn’t agree with. “I’m not,” he said. 

“It’s fine,” Peter had told him, but he’d felt something starting that day, a gnawing hollow in his chest filling up where before there had been nothing. 

They saw each other, now and again, Peter taking the long train to Uxbridge to the university campus, the clattering carriages of the Met line sticky with grime and old gum under the seats. He’d look out of the window, in love with the way London looked in the rain, slick and grey and grand, Dickensian in the dark and metropolitan in the light. His heart was in the city.

He’d see his sister, make nice with her mates – they were all theatre students, all of them a bit odd with a self-consciously cultivated flair for the dramatic, so they’d laugh kindly and appreciate Peter’s strange old-fashioned sense of humour and his innocent charisma. But there was a carefully-schooled air to them that bored him, numbed him, and he’d end up falling quiet looking around for something else, the spark in the dark waiting to become a flame. 

There was always Carl in the back of the room and the back of his mind, watching him.

They were oddly coy with each other at the start, almost secretive, like the very centre of their burgeoning friendship was a connection too strong and volatile to be flouted, and maybe if they were cautious with it, soft with it, it would last longer. 

And then, on an unobtrusive January morning, he received a letter from Carl, smudged and self-conscious, abrupt and heartfelt, telling Peter he was going to give it all up for a dream. 

Peter had come to London on the back of that letter. His train had been late, but he’d found Carl waiting, under the hanging clock in the middle of Waterloo station. It had been romantic, in the way that Peter saw all their meetings as a little romantic – a song in the making, all _Terry meets Julie_ and a sunset over the river. 

Peter didn’t have much on him; a backpack with more holes in it than anything else, and his battered guitar hanging on a strap over his shoulder. He had about two-pound-fifty left in his pocket and he’d smoked his last fag on the platform waiting for the train. 

In that moment his dreams hung, inchoate but irrepressible, on this one dark-haired boy with the fancy name and the rips in his jeans, who held Peter’s whole world on a shoestring.

A year on precisely, and Peter’s in Waterloo again, sitting on the Southbank foreshore under a wooden pier, feet crunching in the dirty shingles, the river stretching out black and vacant ahead of him. St. Paul’s rises illuminated to the East, blue and white and ghostly in a gathering mist. 

Sunset’s come and gone tonight, and the plinking echo of the Kinks’ song plays in Peter’s head as his fingers run through a slippery handful of pebbles. He’s very aware of the sketched-out edges of the situation – him, alone with his memories, moping with acute sentimentality by the banks of the river with half a bottle of Jameson’s down his gullet, just as it starts to rain. He’s conscious of how it all seems, how engineered, predictable, monstrously unsubtle – but he doesn’t know how else to be. 

Peter’s cigarette burns down to the filter between his fingers, and he sniffs, feeling the inching cold crawling up through the sagging cuffs of his jacket, the soggy ends of his trousers. He’s going to get sick, he can feel it. _Chilly, chilly, is the evening time._

Peter’s cigarette sputters out, and like an apparition flickering into view when the lights go out, he looks up, and Carl is there. 

It’s not so much a coincidence, since Peter left him a note asking him to come, but it still takes him a little by surprise. Amid the melancholy and melodramatics playing out in his head, he’d expected Carl to have abandoned him for good. 

“Alright, Carl?” Peter says.

“Bloody typical,” Carl says, not really an answer, and his words are half-eaten by the clench of his teeth around his cigarette. “S’pissing it down.”

“You came, then.” 

“I answered the summons, yes,” Carl mutters. He fumbles in his pocket for another cigarette, which he slips into his mouth alongside his other one, lights it, takes it out from between his lips and hands to Peter. 

Peter takes it. There’s an aching feeling that spreads from the touch of their fingers across his skin and into every piece of him, like there’s a magnet drawing the rusted metal of his blood out of his veins. 

“What’s this about, then?” Carl says, and he kicks his fancy boots at the rocks by their feet. 

Peter tries to pick his words around the puff of the cigarette. He casts around, but there’s nothing easily forthcoming. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he hasn’t got a plan. He got as far as getting Carl here, a sputtering spark of hope in the gloom that things aren’t unfixably broken. He doesn’t know about the rest. “You know it was a year ago we came here?” he says, eventually.

Carl turns to look at Peter, and doesn’t try to disguise the look on his face that says he knows, exactly. “Yeah,” he says. 

“I just think—” Peter grinds a heel into the sand. “Maybe it seems like a lot’s changed since then, but it hasn’t.”

Carl’s legs come to hunch up under his chin. “What d’you mean,” he says, flatly. 

“How I feel. What we are. That’s not changed.”

Carl is silent, his face half in his knees, eyebrows furrowed as he stares out at the river.

Peter’s heartbeat is thick with anxiety, and his hands are cold from the fear of teetering on the edge of his confession. He swallows, and says, “You know I was in love with you from the start.” 

There’s a silence. And then, “I – I know,” Carl mumbles into his knees.

“And I’m still in love with you.”

Carl hides his whole face away and makes a noise that’s part agreement, part anguish. He jerks his chin up and looks at Peter sharply, and Peter tries not to find resentment there. “I dunno what the fuck that means, though. You’re – you’re my best mate.” He doesn’t add, _you’re not a girl._

“Best mate,” Peter agrees. He ticks off on his fingers. “Flatmate, bandmate.” And he thinks about the way his blood sings harsh and warm and searing under his skin when Carl turns his fierce and knowing gaze on him, the way invisible strings bury sharp as hooks into his bones and pull taut when Carl turns his cold-shouldered back on him, and he thinks, _soulmate._

There’s a shift of boots in gravel, distant seagulls crying, muffled traffic rumbling across the bridge, and a silence, stretching out and out and out. Then Carl leans swiftly forward and kisses Peter, brief and light, like the conclusion to a conversation, or the answer to a question that wasn’t asked out loud. 

In the dim shadows of the pier, relief washes up on Peter like the black river lapping the shore. He kisses Carl back, and his whole heart hurts. 

*

It’s late when they take the night bus back to Hackney, and walk home together side by side. 

After-dark London is twitching with sporadic life, shouts and shattered shrieks ring from street corners, the overspill of drunken punters turfed out of the boozers dissipates, lonely cars and sleepless night-buses rumble with a certain carelessness down the unbusy roads. Outside their flat, a bin’s been kicked over again, and Carl in his pointy-toed boots steps with a grimace around a mess of pungent vegetable peel. 

Inside, he kicks off his shoes and goes up the stairs to his room. Peter hesitates a moment, then follows. 

Shucked of the carapace of his jacket and boots, Carl looks oddly vulnerable laid out on the bed, hands crossed to touch his bare elbows, toe poking out of a hole in his shabby socks. “C’mere, then,” he mumbles, not looking at Peter. He looks so unsure, but determined, still, in the set of his shoulders and furrowed brow, and Peter feels the solidification of everything he’s ever felt where Carl is concerned dropping like a rock onto his chest. 

He goes to the bed and lies down. 

Carl holds himself stiffly for a second, but then he rolls to press himself along Peter’s side, head on Peter’s chest, fingers resting in the pale crook of his elbow. Peter breathes out and brings his hand down around Carl’s shoulders, then he breathes in, and his chest expands with the fullness of his feelings. 

Suddenly, Carl’s grip on Peter’s arm tightens, and he mumbles, “I do love you, you know.” His mouth is half-buried Peter’s hair, but he’s so close to Peter’s ear that Peter hears every word as clear as music. “Want you to know that.”

Peter feels his heart singing, and it feels so much like the natural order of things to twist his arm around Carl’s neck and pull him up into a kiss that’s as bruised and bruising as every fight they’ve ever had, and as warm and tender as the affection that led them together in the first place. 

Carl’s lips part under his, the rigid binding of his body eking away in the gentle laps of Peter’s tongue, his hot breath on Peter’s cheeks and mouth blooming like mist on cold windows. 

Every part of Peter wants, in this moment; he is reduced to a blind and needful thing that can only think of touching, consuming, giving, taking, _wanting_. His hands skate down Carl’s shoulders and arms and to his chest in a desperate drag, pushing Carl’s jumper up and under his chin so he can lick and suck the skin there, following the planes of muscle by the tender touch of his lips. 

Carl’s body shudders, convex and concave alternately as he moves towards and away from Peter’s mouth scraping a heated journey from the hollow of his throat to the red line where his jeans bite into his belly. Peter’s tongue is licking the sweat from the ridges in his skin, and Peter’s fingers are undoing buttons, and then Peter’s mouth is sucking spit-damp patches over Carl’s underwear and his cock, and Carl lets out a juddering string of profanities as his fist connects with the wall overhead. 

Peter pushes up into the feel of Carl’s other hand going into his hair, nails scratching his scalp and neck, catching his ear, his forehead, the side of his cheek as Carl grabs blind, letting out a shout as Peter swallows him down and pulls back with a choked cough as Carl’s cock hits the back of his throat too hard, going back down again after he’s taken a breath, eyes wet at the corners, slick lips running spit over the hard length.

Heart pounding so deeply in his chest he can feel the reverberations in the back of his teeth, Peter sucks as much as he can, jerking with a ring of wet fingers touching the red-sore stretch of his mouth around Carl’s cock, until Carl is writhing unashamed, tumbling out curses from his bitten lips, saying _yes_ , and _fuck_ , and _please_. 

Carl fills Peter’s mouth as he comes, moaning and gasping a strained breath as he releases. Peter sits back and doesn’t swallow, pushing the come out of his mouth with his tongue and fingers and wiping it from his chin. When he touches himself, hard cock sticking out from the rumpled, peeled-back waist of his jeans, his hand is wet with it.

Carl sits up on his elbows, glassy-eyed and flushed across his chest. His jeans are twisted around his knees, jumper still on and rucked up to his armpits. He looks so good, so open and raw and here, Peter feels himself burning up with the feel of it, fucking hard and fast into his fist, dewy-wet eyes clumping his eyelashes together as he blinks, watching Carl watching him, until he comes with a high, trailing whine, spilling onto the sheets. 

There’s nothing but their breathing for a long while. 

When he feels less like his movement is going to shatter the sugar-spun fineness of the balance between them, Peter peels off his t-shirt carefully and cleans himself up, wiping the come away from his chest and fingers and mouth and chin. Carl’s just watching him, still. Peter hands the t-shirt over wordlessly, and Carl uses it to wipe himself off, before pulling up and rebuckling his jeans. He pulls his jumper down. 

“What’re we doing tomorrow?” Carl asks, voice low and rough, and the question runs deeper than his words.

“Well,” Peter says. “We’ve run out of milk.”

There’s a folding quiet in the room, layers of silence thick with uncertainty enveloping them steadily, as the tail-end of the night withers softly away.

Tomorrow, Peter thinks, he and Carl will fight again. Tomorrow, Peter will scream at Carl for putting a white ring of condensation on the sleeve of his copy of _Horses_ , and Carl will slam the door on Peter for forgetting to turn the lights off even though they’ve got no money for electricity. Tomorrow, Carl will go out to get the milk, and he’ll get distracted by a pretty girl behind the checkout and Peter will feel his guts screw into his throat when Carl forgets to come home. And the morning after, Peter will wake up, and Carl won’t be there, and Peter will feel the well-practiced anguish of jealousy eat away at the rawest parts of him. 

Peter doesn’t want to think about tomorrow.

“C’mere,” he says, and Carl comes, willing, for now, into Peter’s arms. “Kiss me?”

Carl kisses with his whole body, fingers twisted in Peter’s hair, jeans sweat-damp and warm against Peter’s thighs, a belt buckle cutting cold into the soft flesh of his belly. Peter kisses back, calming the longing in his bones. Tomorrow, he thinks, can wait.


End file.
